Category: Creative process

A cinematic day

Katharine Asals8 Comments

The day began with breakfast for two at the famous dumpling place on Spadina, and the fortune in my cookie said something stern about <<mettre de l’eau dans son vin>> and as we pushed through the doors and out into the street we debated the meaning of this, the translation, but also the intention of the saying, was it about making concessions, adjustments, or was it about making do with less?

Wandering through Kensington Market, my friend started telling me about a new practice she’s exploring called “Access Consciousness” and how she’s been given a series of questions to ask herself throughout the day – questions like “who does this belong to?” which you ask slowly, repeatedly about emotions, reactions that come up, but then also the question “how does it get any better than this?” which you ask yourself again and again and again, relaxing into all of the truth of the moment and wondering if it possibly could…

HOW does it get any better than this?

How does it get ANY BETTER than this?

How does it get any better than THIS?

This wonderful, meditative question reminded me of the way I feel when working on the 100 Day Challenge I’ve been doing for a couple of months now – it’s purposely not too ambitious, only about the joy of the thing, focused on the simple pleasures of paper, maybe pencil, maybe some watercolours, but who knows, maybe some charcoal depending on the day, depending on the creature, the image.

Seated Hare – charcoal, white charcoal, and watercolour on paper

This week, I am writing about noticing. About paying attention. About exploring what the Universe is telling us. This journey can be both arduous and joyful. It is certainly worthwhile.

Begin here

Paying attention is key to any artistic or life pursuit. It’s how we use all our senses. When we pay attention, we see patterns we otherwise would miss. We hear the chimes of the Universe, taste more intensely, let smell spark memory.

Touch

The most elemental of the senses for artists, even more than sight or hearing, is touch. It is how we relate to our materials. We touch the keyboard, the pens, the yarn, the paint, the fabric, the fragile silk of an emerging flower. Touch the sensitive place behind the ear, the pulse point of understanding.

~ Fran Gardner for The 100 Day Project

* * *

Many blocks further up into Little Italy on such a beautiful sunny day and we sat in the park for what seemed like days, catching up on so many things, but here and there remembering that beautiful question, until it was time to pee so we headed out through a little pathway that had been beaten out amongst some trees and oooo’d and aaaa’d over the little fields of bluebells giving a colourful shape to the path.

How does it get any better?

Up at my friend’s beloved familiar home, we ended up on the back porch as is always the case on a gorgeous spring day, and it was still too cool for the cherry blossoms to have started on the huge cherry tree that dominates the back yard, but I noticed all the textures in little corners of collected objects, of aging wood against cut glass and burnished metal and porous ceramics.

Oh how I miss these kinds of textures that we had everywhere back in the days when we lived in a funny little house with a splendid back yard and a pond and an orange cat and a crumbling wooden fence and moss covered bricks.

After a trundle down Parliament in a busy crowded bus it was getting dark by the time I got to my brand spanking new neighbourhood of concrete and steel and glass, with no gardens, no aging wood or porous ceramics, but lo and behold, there are still moments of magic when the fog from the lake creeps up at dusk and the skies simply couldn’t get any better…

Lens Artists Challenge – Cinematic

All photos apped out with an early version of the Waterlogue app

Bold & reckless

Katharine Asals8 Comments

I’d signed up for a Sketchbook Challenge – something to carry me through the holidays, when I had a feeling things might be a bit challenging, a bit daunting – there was the personal level of things shaping up to be tough, but of course there had also been that election in the States, and as much as we would all like to pretend it’s just politics, in another country, not here… Yah. Whatever. It’s been a lot.

Anyways, a little creative challenge that would engage me on a daily rhythm but had no ambitious trappings to it felt just right.

At the beginning of course you are instructed to Find Your Why. And the main Why I found was an intention to push to be bold and reckless and experimental, to be messy and try things. To try things and fail at them. After all, it’s just a sketchbook.

So I went with that, and for days and days I did free and loose and messy and anything goes…

Bit by bit, the looser things got, the more I longed for structure, and I found myself drawing some objects, specific things over and over again –

How much the same thing can be so different every time…

Somewhere along the way, without really thinking about it, I felt like I needed to be doing something bigger – big drawings. Just being in the groove, rolling with the constant practice, it felt like putting a bit sheet of paper on the wall and drawing with charcoal would satisfy some kind of longing, so I did it.

The paper is somewhere around 4 ft x 4 ft.

Looking back now I kind of love that early phase where it’s not quite clear what is where and what’s going on, but I kept on going.

And ended up with this.

But maybe especially as it was an evolution from the daily scribbly sketchbook drawings, it feels like this is maybe just the first one of many…

Lens Artists Challenge – Bold

Things making me smile

Katharine Asals2 Comments

Things making me smile recently include…

The Lake. The lake, forever the lake.

Also.

An outing to the market, and an older fellow who I point at to draw his attention to the fact that we both are wearing plaid “shackets”, smiles and throws obscure accented phrases back at me. Twenty minutes later I see him again, walking the other way, and we both laugh and toss a few more cryptic phrases at each other – misunderstanding each other in words, but smiling all the way.

Lunch with a friend and she shows me her latest painting. The vibrant spirit of it. In a series of texts with another friend she sends me pix of various lanterns and light makers she’s been working on. The joy of sharing creative projects with friends who get it, friends who listen and remember, friends who say things that hit you sideways and help you think.

Still and again, in the middle of the day, this wholly absolutely irresistible tune –

The deep but quiet private joy, that for a few weeks now there’s been time to sketch on a daily basis, and the pleasure of surrendering to it, the daily question of what next, and of drawing and drawing and drawing…

Good drawings, bad drawings, whatever. Just drawing drawing drawing.

Hours spent at the little red kidney table by the windows, and for a moment around dusk, I look out at the sky beyond my table and whaddya know.

Circling.

A hawk.

The effortless soar. So high it’s hard to tell if it’s above the Gardiner or maybe floating above the park along Esplanade.

The joy of birds, of flight.

Earlier in the week, out by the water, by the sugar dock. Seagulls everywhere, thrilling to the scent of sugar in the air as a ship unloads.


Simple pleasures.

And then, in the midst of everything, absolutely every friggin thing going down in the strange strange world that is our modern existence, there is this hilarious yet deadly serious quote rediscovered:

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.

~ Wendell Berry

Lens Artists – This Made me Smile