“Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, on an ever spinning reel,” Alan and Marilyn Bergman
I don’t usually plan ahead what I’m going to write in my blogs – you’ve probably guessed that if you read them regularly – but when Michel Legrand died recently, I started thinking about one of his most famous compositions, “Windmills of your mind” and was wondering how I could fit in a reference to it. I’ve loved this song since I first heard it, mostly because it was sung by Noel Harrison. (I had a crush on him when he starred in The Girl from Uncle with Stephanie Powers. In my defence, I was 8 and not very discriminating about the sort of television programmes I watched.) Anyway poor M. Legrand’s demise got me humming the tune and thinking about beginnings and how difficult it is to spot the point at which you stop being a student of something and start putting what you’ve learnt into practice.
I know from my own experience learning to speak Welsh, going from dweud eich dweud in the classroom to sgwrsio yn y byd go iawn is as terrifying as going from pedalling a tricycle with stabilisers on to riding a racing bike with razor blade thin wheels down a steep hill. You can read more about how I got on with the Welsh language here incidentally. If you are dysgu Cymraeg fel oedolion it might make you realise that having a sense of humour is as necessary as a command of grammar.
Trying to work out the point when I got to grips with creativity is less easy. When it comes to Textile Art, I disagree with John Galsworthy when he said “beginnings are always messy.” This is my attempt at portraying the brooding atmosphere of Kenfig Pool in the year 2000. Local legend has it that a wizard cursed the inhabitants of the prosperous borough of Kenfig for not offering him shelter. A fierce storm arose and as the sea broke through the defences and flooded the village, drowning it for ever, a ghostly cry of Dial a ddaw! (Vengeance is coming!) was heard on the wind. If ever a piece of my work failed to capture a sense of place, this is it.
Shortly after I began a course in Creative Textiles with the Open College of Arts and had to come to terms with using a sketchbook to record the way in which pieces of work were developing. I have never enjoyed working this way. I see a piece of white paper and am convinced that any mark I make on it will spoil it forever. In spite of repeated attempts to convince my tutors that I was useless at drawing and worse at painting, they refused to give me dispensation for that part of the course. Grumbling and resentful, I set about a project on responding to place. I chose the entrance to an old mine close to where I live as the subject partly because it was easy to get to but also because I’d read something about it being haunted.
Bit by bit I came to realise that learning to be creative was much the same as studying Welsh. I didn’t need to be good at drawing or skilled at painting – these were simply the nouns and verbs of a visual language; my sketchbook was not a collection of images which were nice to look at – it was a record that only I needed to understand.
Just recently (January 2019) I attended a course at Kenfig Nature Reserve and had half an hour to spare before it started. I decided to walk across the sand dunes and pay a visit to Kenfig Pool. Having a mobile phone means that these days, there’s always a camera to hand so I started off taking a couple of photographs.
I’ve gone from thinking of sketchbooks as a necessary evil to a useful bit of kit. My change of opinion is down to finally finding a technique which works for me; I use a felt pen to draw on a still wet watercolour wash and because I’ve come to terms with the fact that the sketchbook is a resource for me and me alone, I don’t worry about whether it is good by anyone else’s standards.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks doing a small art map of Kenfig Pool. It’s still a work in progress but you’ll be able to see how it’s going to turn out. It makes an interesting comparison to that needlepoint work I did nearly 20 years ago.
In amongst all of these Kenfig Pool shenanigans, I was invited to contribute work to an exhibition called ‘Interior Monologues’ which is opening on the 11th February 2019 at Oriel y Bont . I’ve produced a piece of poetic prose as a response to the work of artist Mererid Velios . It’s been a new and exciting method of collaboration for me and I’ve really enjoyed it. Interestingly enough, I probably would never have got involved except for the fact that Barrie and Maria, my Creative Writing lecturers from 2004 and 2005, remembered that I always wanted to write about visual art. Are there such things as beginnings and endings? I don’t think so.
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams
