Plucky Daily Creative

DAY THIRTY Well here we are, the end of the first month of this project, 8.33% of the way there.    "I feel like a chipped cup, I won't ever be the same again."    The context of that statement is distressing, and I won't mention it, but I want to write about broken things, imperfect things. We live in a throwaway world, or at least we did. Call me an optimist but it does seem things are changing, though, call me a pessimist, that impression could have been formed by fashionable media commentary. It's hard to tell.  Everyday creatives are probably more conscious than the average person of the need to conserve resources; reuse, repurpose, recycle is not only a mantra for the green movement, but also a practical approach to hobbies and interests. Speaking personally, nothing gives me greater pleasure than finding a new way to use something. I've always been like that and it connects with notions of creativity which I wrote about a day or two ago. As with many th...

DAY TWENTY NINE I'm a failure, A dumkopf. Useless.  I've certainly had that thought when something I've been working on hasn't worked out quite as planned, but was it ever justified, and does it help in any way to berate oneself in such a fashion? In the world this blog exists and for the people it is aimed at, failure really shouldn't be such a problem. More often than not one can simply start over, and chalk the whole thing up to experience. You will have learnt something from it and are unlikely to fail in precisely the same way again. At worst you will have wasted some time, materials, and may have to buy that Christmas present rather than handing over a lovingly (or determinedly) made piece of work.  Those investments will be quickly forgotten and in any case are not at the root of most people's sense of failure. The investment that causes the problem is the investment of oneself , our identity, our pride, our sense of self-efficacy, which refers to the set...

DAY TWENTY EIGHT A very brief post today as I really don't have much time to spare.   There's no accounting for taste. This is a sentence often used to dismiss something one disagrees with, especially someone else's choices. It's come to mind because I've been getting some traction on line with my photography lately, but am constantly suprised by the work that gets picked up and that which doesn't.    On at least three occasions I've posted a picture with a sigh of satisfaction, thinking 'that's a good one'. (More accurately I typically post them with a sense of 'how come I didn't like this picture at the time, now it seems like a good 'un).  Other times I'll post something which I think of as filler but which in some way fits the topic of the day. These may or may not be what I think of as good pictures, and some of them are downright iffy from a technical perspective.    And you've guessed it, the dodgier ones seem to get mo...

 DAY TWENTY SEVEN What is the more difficult, having the idea or executing it? This has been on my mind following something I saw on social media, more accurately, someone.    I tend to consider myself as fairly inventive, not short of an idea or two. For many years I used to think my only real ability was to make connections between disparate thoughts and ideas to come up with new angles and approaches, usually in order to address old and longstanding problems. It was an applied  use of creativity so to speak. As I wrote in the first post here I made this aspect of creativity something of a career.  As a senior manager and a consultant this led to me often being quite dismissive about the ability to have ideas and be creative in the abstract,  convinced as I was that such ideas were ten-a-penny and that being able to deliver an idea in a given organisational, cultural or financial context was more important in the final analysis. Indeed, being truly c...

DAY TWENTY SIX Have you ever tried teaching someone a skill?    They say that the best way of understading a thing is to try to teach it. I can attest to that, up to a point. I have 'taught' stuff, or at least led workshops and given presentations - I even trained as a teacher but never pursued it as a career - and yes, the amount of preparation one needs to do, which is in a ratio of about 10:1 between background and content actually delivered does mean that you take a deep dive into a subject. You also have to think about how best to get that content across, which means thinking about other factors such as the time available, the setting, age and prior knowledge of the audience and so on.   In saying all this, I have never tried to teach a skill; the teaching I have done has always been about passing on (at least that was the intention) knowledge, insight and understanding. The only two exceptions was when for fun I ran a workshop in tying knots, which now I come to thi...

DAY TWENTY FIVE This is the post I intended to write yesterday, before I allowed things to follow their own path.    The question asked then was about purpose - why do you do what you do creatively, why do you make what you do? This question has been asked many times, sometimes presented as a challenge or a prompt for reflection.   Someone once asked of writers, are you looking to entertain, move, educate, or inform your readers? And are you writing for yourself, for a particular audience, or for humanity at large? Words to that effect. These are good questions but rather paint the choices as mutually exclusive. Why can't you do all of them at once? The mission statement of the British Broadcasting Corporation for example, drawn up 100 years ago by John Reith its founding Director General is to inform, educate and entertain i.e. to do all those things, and sometimes it does them all at once - David Attenborough's nature programmes are a good example of this. I find it int...

DAY TWENTY FOUR What is your purpose in creating or making things?    Perhaps it's for the simple pleasure of doing it and needs no further explanation. Perhaps it's for the sense of 'flow', the intense concentration and engagement with something which can be deeply relaxing and satisfying at the same time. Maybe you like to learn new things, or you like a sense of achievement and accomplishment. For me it's about problem solving and practical, useful outcomes - a piece of furniture, something to wear, something fixed, life made easier in some way.  Many people might say that they want to communicate something, they try to express and share an idea, a point of view, a moment in time, an image, an emotion. You might do things to give others pleasure, perhaps by making gifts and presents or something to simply entertain and delight.    Though not everyone sees this as a good thing.   There's a trend for people to try and make money from what were previously c...

DAY TWENTY THREE "Know your lines and try not to bump into the furniture." The above quote is one of those which seems to have many origins. I know it as advice given by a grand old man of the theatre to a novice actor, as a traditionally trained British stage actor to an American method actor, and as self-deprecating comment by Noel Coward on his own approach to acting. It comes to mind as I've been thinking about the ratio of words written about any given activity compared with the doing of the activity itself. This blog is one infintesmally small example of what I mean - it adds a weight of words, and however much I try to avoid it, analysis, about activities which are best experienced in the doing, or in the appreciating. Words, albeit the main means by which we might communicate about experience, tend to get in the way of the more direct experiences of doing, looking, feeling, touching, using or even wearing, all of which are possible with crafts. In particular I hav...

DAY TWENTY TWO Amateurs, professionals, sharing your work, public art.    My creative endeavours are strictly amateur, for my own amusement and satisfactions. Half the pleasure is in simply learning to do something new and it would be unfair to inflict the results on an unsuspecting relative, still less the public at large. I have shared photography via social media and from time to time been a member of writing groups where typically one reads out a piece of work and receives (kindly) feedback, but the idea of making work for the purpose of public display or publication has never entered my mind.    On the other hand I have a friend, a trained and in my opinion very talented artist. Over the thirty years of our friendship I have known her turn her hands to all sorts of media and each time she knocks it out the park. Even her unfinished works and experiments are impressive. Her notebooks are works of art in themselves. But apart from group and amateur art club exhibi...

DAY TWENTY ONE End of week three. Never expected to get this far, trying to ignore the 49 weeks to come.  'Necessity is the mother of invention'.    This was very much on my mind last night as I discovered the mushrooms which were to be the other ingredient in a chicken and leek pie had gone a bit furry. The Chicken, Leek and Sweet Potatoe pie which resulted turned out to be pretty good, possibly even better than the original much-used tried and tested recipe.   This brings to mind the question of planning versus spontaneity/discovery/serendipity/happy accidents.   The most beautiful shade of green I've ever seen formed itself in a pallete when I was about 8 years old.    I'd been mucking around mixing watercolours, the big hard lumpy ones they gave you in school and which took almost an entire lesson to soften enough to work with, and there it appeared - deep, rich, glowing, peaceful, somehow, a colour somewhere between lime and turquoise. I thought o...

DAY TWENTY   "I was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her".  Looking Back. Johnny Watson.   Genre. Fashion. What the market wants. It's just as well nobody reads this blog, as what I'm about to say is not likely to earn me many friends I suspect.  Go into any bookshop, or seeing as they've all but disappeared from most towns, supermarket, and take a look at the paperbacks on offer. What you'll find is lots of books with similar titles, similar cover designs, similar content.     YA (young adult) is a big thing, and lest we forget, an invention of the marketing department. Magic and/or vampires will be involved.    There'll be lots of romance books, many of them set in the Second World War for some reason. And then they'll be our Kitty from't mill falling for the saturnine but ultimately deceitful charms of young Mr. Harrowby, t'mill's owner's son, before finding true love with the quiet boy who ...

DAY NINETEEN How do creative people and makers respond to other people's work?    I don't know that one could or should generalise. I haven't read anything or discussed the matter at any length with others; I suspect it's something of a 'family secret' - we don't talk about it.    There are people of course who seem able to be unreservedly warm and generous about the work of others, but I suspect that even with the most open-hearted there is an urge to compare themself against the other, and if the other's work is good, a pang of threat or competition in their heart somewhere.    I don't think it's cyncial to say that we all find it easier to be generous about work we don't rate as good as our own. The real skill is in not giving in to the urge to compare in the first place.  The question is on my mind because I've recently dived back into social media after a long break and been exposed to a lot of other people's creative work. It...

DAY EIGHTEEN Today's post is a work of fiction, or rather the imagination, as I have no direct experience of what I speak - dance.  (Spoiler: I refute that statement completely by the end of this post). In thinking of everyday creativity what could possibly be easier than dancing? No need for materials or equipment, no real need to think, you have everything you need to hand. Your body, your self. Move it, jiggle it, wave it about, you're done. But what has been created, what communicated? And is it - dreadful question alert - Art? Dance is for me the most inaccessible of creative endeavours. I don't get it. Don't begin to get it.    I'm not just talking of the high art of ballet, or the mysterious meanings of subtle hand movements in Indian or Japanese dance forms. I'm talking about discos, raves, Strictly Come Dancing and the kitch performativity of line dancing. What is it? What is to enjoy in it either as a doer or a watcher?   One of the underlying purpose...

DAY SEVENTEEN Should we suspend judgment until a work is finished? I don't know, let's think about it later.    Anyone involved in any sort of creative project will have faced this question many times. In fact, it's probably impossible to totally suspend judgment while working on something; there are a myriad of small decisions which have to be made along the way, each one implying some process of judgment. Much of this will be an unconscious process, and as a general rule I think the more experienced the maker is with a certain process, the more unconscious the process of questioning and judgment is likely to be. Indeed, this now comes under the heading 'received wisdom' I think.    Some of you may be familiar with the idea that in learning any subject or skill we go through the stages of: Unconscious Incompetence → Conscious Incompetence → Conscious Competence → Unconscious Competence In other words we go from not knowing what we don 't know to not knowing wh...

DAY SIXTEEN How does emotion convey itself in creativity or making, either in the practice or the appreciation of it?   There are some obvious answers to this - colour, materials, the energy or vibrancy of design or movement; tone, melody, volume, speed, consonance and dissonance; proportion, harmony, perspective, and so on. In some hands these can be deliberately used and manipulated to convey a certain feeling (that's pretty much the point of music, if only to entertain), other times the emotion grows from the finished artefact with no thought or design necessarily being given to it.    Sometimes, with fine art, for example, or architecture, I feel there is something a little 'forced' or taught about these things; one has a sense of what one ought to feel because of the tradition from which a work has emerged or its longstanding inclusion in the canon. I often fail to get whatever it is I'm supposed to in such curcumstances and am left puzzled and curious rather than...

DAY FIFTEEN Serendipitous day yesterday.    Perhaps inspired by yesterday's mea culpa about not creating something everyday but more likely a  show-stopping display of yellow leaves through the gloom of the afternoon mist, I found myself taking photos on my phone for about an hour yesterday. The idea was just to take a quick snap to remind me of the scene, but I ended up taking more than fifty pictures despite the dreek conditions. Just about everything was against the taking of decent photos - mist, resulting in a low, flat light; a fairly monotonous subject matter (shaded woodland) with little contrast; a phone camera, which takes a lot of work to obtain decent results; and I was in a hurry to get home. All that said the spirit of Fox Talbot was apparently with me. Some of the results were really quite pleasing, startlingly so in one or two cases. I have no idea how that came about*.   Here is one of the results, though by no means the most interesting. I've put ...

DAY FOURTEEN End of the second week of this blog, and mostly, all is well.   I say mostly because I haven't yet found the groove I was hoping for as far as daily postings are concerned, much as I've enjoyed the reflections I've written up so far.    The intention was, still is, to make or create something every day and reflect on that experience, rather than write about creativity in general, but that would have meant every posting being about the book I'm writing, or about the blog itself, which would have been a bit 'meta' and once upon a time, terribly postmodern. The fact is I hoped the blog would at least in part inspire me to make something every day (other than the blog itself), give me just that tad more encouragement I need. This seemed perfectly feasible a fortnight ago, and the idea hasn't yet descended in my thinking to the level of 'wildly ambitious', a level on which, in a far dark corner, is located the rather overstocked 'cupboard...

DAY THIRTEEN Somebody always has to spoil it.    When I started this blog, on a whim, it was up and running an hour later, I used the phrase 'everyday creativity' in its, uh, everyday sense, meaning anything big or small, 'artistic', 'crafty' or not, that ordinary folk might do and which might reasonably be called creative. For instance, finding some clever way to fix a leaky pipe instead of immediately calling a plumber would count as creative in my book; creating a meal from scratch rather than reaching for a phone app to have something delivered might also, provided it had some kind of elan to it; my increasingly infirm relative's ingenious ways to maintain independence in their own home. Tick that.  True, I suspected the blog might bend a little in the direction of the things which interest me most, rather more typical activities such as writing, painting, woodwork, textile and other crafts, but the overall intent was not to gussy up the creating and ma...

DAY TWELVE Writing this on a train so I'll be brief in order not to lose too much thinking time.    I've always found solo train travel, and coach travel too for that matter, very conducive to creative thinking. Almost without exception my best thoughts come while travelling.    Whether it's the steady rhythym, the unfamiliar environment, the array of strangers to ponder about, the scenery flashing by providing a stream of prompts and provocations, the fact that your physical journey also becomes a journey through time, memory taking you back to other journeys, other destinations, other people... who knows. It works for me.    Even difficult journeys can be worthwhile in this respect, providing as they do opportunities to consider your reaction to setbacks and unexpected situations. If you see me out and about today it will be with a notebook and pen or a stack of notecards, scribbling away intently and contentedly.  Onwards...literally.