iris-impressions.com » Mixed Media Painting

New Art Pieces in February and March 2011

Iris — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:03:58 +0000

I have been busy busy for a change! Usually I am just lazy lazy. I have been cutting down on my World of Warcraft time lately (and unfortunately also violin time, I’d like to play more but am feeling hugely unmotivated currently), not really as a conscious choice but I just find I am busy with other things that I enjoy more.

Saturday just gone marked 30 weeks of my pregnancy! So over the past few months and the coming few weeks I’m seeing a lot of friends to catch up before ‘my life is over’ (as I’ve patronisingly been told by some people). It’s both scary and exciting to think that it’s not much longer to wait now. We’re doing a lot of preparations at the moment, mostly in the form of buying stuff. We still need to get a car seat and the carrycot attachment for our pushchair. Other than that it’s just a ton of small stuff we need. We’re also starting antenatal classes at the end of this month. We’ve signed up for the NCT courses and I look forward to meeting other couples in our area.

I’ve been fairly productive with art lately. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy that’s inspiring me or maybe the feeling of spring which is always a positive time of year. When it comes to creating art it’s the mental obstacles that stand in my way the most (I am not good enough, my art is not pretty enough, it doesn’t look as good as x/y/z artist’s work, I don’t create as much as others so mine isn’t ‘valid’ somehow etc, the list goes on for a looooong time!). I can’t say I have found a specific way of battling these demons, but I am feeling slightly more confident lately and am really trying to tell myself that doing ANY art is all part of the process, whether I like the piece I end up with or not.

Pregnant Princess – I’d had the idea for doing a whimsy pregnancy painting floating around in my head for a while. After doing Bird in a Cage which had very dark colours, I wanted to do something with light and cheery colours. We’ve been working on our baby’s room and I wanted to make something that could possibly go up on the wall in there. I am quite pleased with how the piece turned out overall. I always find it scary to paint a face because I never feel like I have a lot of fine control over the expression, but it turned out OK (although quite different from the sketch I was working from!). I also like the colours and the textures.

Walking My Elephant – I actually don’t like this one particularly. I felt good about it when it was still a sketch, but then I started with the colour and stuff went wrong (the black outlines smudged around her mouth and I didn’t end up being able to fix it properly). Ironically I’ve had some comments from people that they like it and they think it’s cute. That just goes to show! I guess I like the concept but too much went wrong with the execution so it just left me with a bad feeling that I can’t seem to shake.

I Am Already Authentic – This one I like, both because of what it looks like and what it represents. This is an art journal spread that is the week 1 assignment of Tam’s free Art, Heart & Healing course. The aim of the assignment was to listen to my inner critical voice and write down all my self-criticisms and doubts. Then I gessoed over the words as a symbolic letting go. The next part was to paint a ‘self portrait’ and turn the criticisms into one positive statement (coming from the point of view that the critical self is only trying to protect us, albeit going about it in a negative and self-destructive way!).

For me the main theme that came out of this exercise is around not feeling authentic or special as I am, and always feeling like I have to be more like other people in order to be liked or loved or noticed. It’s a constant struggle as intellectually I know I am authentic and special and have my own unique message to impart, but I find it very hard to really feel and believe that as well. It is one of the many reasons I find it hard to create art and update my blog regularly as well! I often can’t imagine why anyone could possibly be interested in me or what I have to say. I am not saying that in a self-deprecating ‘pity me’ way by the way, I am just trying to illustrate some of my personal struggles around self-worth and authenticity.

Hint Of A Smile – A while back I did a workshop at Blade Rubber Stamps to learn how to make your own Japanese Stab Bound Journal. It was a fun class and at the end we took home our own album that we made during the class. I think it has about 15 pages in it with nice high quality paper (not watercolour paper but it’s fairly thick and very nice for art journalling on). This piece is on the first page of the album. It’s so nice to work in an album I created myself from scratch! Really adds to the feeling of ownership and pride. I am also very pleased with this page. I felt confident and in control about the face and I like the colours and level of complexity in the background.

Hetty & Dimitri’s Wedding

Iris — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:22:50 +0000

When I was in my second year of uni I shared a flat (in Lewisham *shudders*) with Hetty. In the same year she met Dimitri and on 31 July 2010 (Saturday just gone) she got married to him! I went over to Gibraltar where the wedding was being held (they live there) and spent a lovely couple of days with Hetty, her family & friends. It was really amazing and the wedding was perfect! (I know everyone says that, but I work in the wedding industry so I like to pretend a statement like that from me carries more weight =p)

They didn’t have a gift list and said they didn’t want any presents because people being able to come to Gibraltar was present enough. Obviously I couldn’t show up empty handed, but I’m not a big fan of giving toasters (besides, a nice toaster is bloody expensive!) or generic presents just for the sake of giving something. So I decided to create a painting. I think it was back in February last year that Hetty asked if I would do a painting for her, after seeing the painting I made for my aunt.

I set up my art desk and identified my art supplies (all still in boxes from our move in April) which were conveniently located in the box that was tucked furthest away and underneath 3 boxes filled with books.. And I set to work. I started on the Sunday before the wedding and finished it on Thursday evening (because I flew out on the Friday), which is very fast for me. However, I think it’s actually good for me to be under a bit of time pressure, because it makes me get on with things and forces me not to think too much. Thinking too much can have a devastating effect on ‘getting things done’ for me, because self doubt creeps in quickly and makes it impossible to create freely.

The first picture below is the finished painting. Stupidly enough I only took that one picture of it when finished rather than close-ups of the details as I usually do. Ah well. The other pictures are of the progress in chronological order. You can click each picture for a bigger version.

Finished painting

Sketch on wood

Skin tones painted

Hair painted

Clothes painted

Cats painted

Initial background layers added

Interesting Article About Decision Making

Iris — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:07:00 +0000

Decision Time. This article published on the BBC News site today is pretty interesting. It is about emotion vs rationality in decision making.

Things that especially resonate with me are:

As Kahneman and Tversky put it: “In human decision-making, losses loom larger than gains.”

Loss aversion is now recognised as an important mental bias, with widespread implications. Our desire to avoid anything that smacks of a loss often shapes our behaviour, leading us to do foolish things.

As a person who has experienced rather acute loss in my life, loss aversion is something that influences and controls my life to a large extent. For example procrastination. Lots of people dismiss procrastination with a simplistic ‘you are lazy’, however to me, procrastination is an effect of trying to limit the feeling of loss.

I also like this:

So how should we make a decision? The key is something called metacognition, or thinking about thinking.

As it hails back to what Eckhart Tolle writes about in The Power of Now. He explains how one can observe the brain when it is filled with emotion or reacting emotionally. Like for example, if you are feeling badly you could either wallow in the feeling (which will prolong the feeling and probably augment it, too) or look at the feeling and see what kind of thinking created it and is perpetuating it. It lets you understand the feeling more fully than if you were just feeling the feeling.

I really like coming across articles (especially on big respected websites!) that connect with other things that I am currently reading or thinking about.

Hope & Joy Finished Painting

Iris — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:35:54 +0000

It’s been sitting on my desk for a few days, awaiting beeswax and I still need to paint the sides.

I scanned it this time, rather than taking a picture of it and the colours are soooo much better this way. The only thing is, that scanning it in three parts and putting it back together in Photoshop is worse than having your foot run over by a truck.

Painting is kind of like knitting (ya, rly). The actual process is fun, but then afterwards there are certain things you need to do to ‘finish’ it (like getting rid of yarn ends *shudders*) and those are just demotivating and result in having your painting sit on your desk for a week or your knitting forgotten in a bag somewhere.

Anyway, I’m totally babbling because I was waiting for the photos to upload.

Update of Epic Proportions

Iris — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:02:09 +0000

Soooo I haven’t updated since August! I’m so bad at sticking with something (like blogging). I’m so good at starting stuff, just not great at finishing, it’s the story of my life I swear!

So I’ve been thinking that I want this blog & site to be a bit different. OK I go through a phase thinking that every so often and then fizzle out, but gosh darnit this time I’m serious! I think.. Soooo this blog post is gonna just incorporate everything that I was thinking this site will incorporate too, which is pure and undiluted ME. What else did you expect, right?

First of all, what has been happening in the life of Iris since August 2008? Well, I guess the most groundbreaking, earthshattering and interesting fact is that.. *drumroll* I got married! The lucky victim was (and is) Andrew, my boyfriend of 4 years. We got married in London on 31 October 2008.

We went on our honeymoon to Leicestershire (how exotic, I know) where we had rented a narrow boat. It was so peaceful and amazing. I would recommend this type of holiday to anyone. And even though we went in November and it was cold, that didn’t make it uncomfortable or anything. The weather was just part of it and we had some amazing days.

I did a bit of art while on the boat but haven’t taken pics of that yet, but I will soon. I just can’t stress enough how amazingly tranquil it was, SUCH a good place to get inspired and do art. It’s also nice to be in a place that doesn’t have the usual distractions of computers & the internet.

Now that we’re married we’re incredibly poor. *cries* I know I know, children in Africa are starving and I don’t know what the word ‘poor’ really means. It’s been good for us in a way though, because we’ve had to really evaluate what we spend, and what we can spend. Nevertheless, at certain times it depresses me a bit because going without luxuries, even though very doable, can be a bit of a dampener on our spirits. It also makes socialising very hard. People suggesting we go catch up with a drink/dinner, a friend of mine who has invited me to her wedding. Can’t afford to do those kind of things. Blegh, talking about it is making me feel sad, so I’ll just move on!

On January 5th it was my grandmother’s (if I recall correctly) 92nd birthday! Isn’t that amazing? As she doesn’t really need anything and we couldn’t afford anything, I made her a present! I created a painting for her.

Because of the ‘deadline’ (her birthday) this is actually the quickest mixed media piece I have ever done (2 evenings). I think that was really good for me, because it meant I had to just DO IT, rather than thinking about it for ages and ending up leaving it half finished in a drawer somewhere.

Apparently it made her cry profusely which was weird on the one hand and very touching on the other. I think maybe she thought it was supposed to represent me and my mother. I painted it having in mind a grandmother & granddaughter figure though (not necessarily me and her).

When it comes to work, work is just.. work. I wish I liked it more than I do. Just a bit of background, Andrew and I work together on our own video production business. He started it up about 2.5 years ago and I’ve been working full-time for the company for about 1.5 years. It is not my passion, nor what I want to do with my life, but I DO want to support Andrew and help build something for us. I just hope to figure out sooner or later what it is that I actually want to do. It’s all well and good knowing what you don’t want to do, but that still doesn’t help me find out what I do want to do. There are way too many do’s in that paragraph so I will stop it now.

This update is starting to become pretty epic so I think I will wrap it up, that way hopefully I will have something more to say when I update again soon.