"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up" -Picasso. "Every child is an artist". Printed and laminated in colourful letters in school art rooms around the globe. And some of those art rooms will also be decorated with lovely anchor charts and rubrics - you can go check 'em out on Pinterest - carefully instructing the children (who are already artists, according to Picasso) how to do it right. One of my (not!) favourites is the rubric insisting that kindergarten children should use "colours that make sense"! (Suns are yellow apparently and trees are green and brown, not purple with pink spots and blue stripes).
That's the solution to the Picasso Problem. Permission to PLAY! It works for responsible adults too. Want to step up your own creativity, activate the happy, healthy endorphins, give the muscle between your ears a valuable work-out, give your worn-out grown up mind some necessary R&R - give yourself permission to play. Diarise it or Google Calendar it, if you must be all grown-up and schedule-y. But just do it. For the fun of it. Because it's good for you. Play is something you should definitely take seriously! You know there's loads of research. This one's a good place to start “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” - Kurt Vonnegut. So what's next? Ready to play? Check out my previous "Snap Happy" post for some ideas or just grab some crayons and get started. Yes, crayons. They're not just for kids. Permission to play, remember? Just have fun with it. More about crayons next time. Meanwhile, in the tradition of Eric Carle (and Franz Marc) on a scrap of Kraft paper, here's Skippy in Blue!
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"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." -Dorothea Lange. "Learning to draw is learning to see" - Betty Edwards. Photo - graphy. Light drawing. From the Greek. There you go. (In the spirit of Gus Portakalos from My Big Fat Greek Wedding).
Dorothea Lange was a photo-journalist, passionate about social justice. She used her camera to "teach people to see" what was happening in their world, and to inspire change. Her words quoted at the beginning of this post open so many blogs, articles and reflections that it's running a perilous risk of cliche, to use them again. However, I'll let them stand, since this blog is dedicated to "learning to see" and to accessing innate creativity - who knows what might change when we tap into that potential!
But your main HOMEWORK for this week, (yes, I did say "homework", don't make me use my teacher voice!) is: 1) Get out and take photographs. Look for new perspectives. Crop and edit and play with them if you wish. Just have fun with it! 2) Look at what other people are snapping. Find some photography to follow on social media. Don't think about (or Google) what gear the pros are using, just look at the images and consider the compositions that appeal to you. Photo challenge accounts on Instagram are a fantastic resource. You might like to jump in and join the current challenges or just follow and observe. (We'll talk more about challenges in future posts...stay tuned!). Make sure you look at their hashtags too, so that you can see a range of participants, not just the featured few. Highly recommend the @fms.photoaday account - a longstanding challenge initiated by Chantelle Ellem who blogs as Fat Mum Slim (Find participants with the hashtag #FMSPAD). Also follow @it's_my_week, new theme and new hashtags every week.
Have questions? Feel like a chat? Jump into the comments here (but please be aware that comments are moderated, so if your comment doesn't appear immediately, I might be sleeping, or painting, or out taking photos. I will get it it ASAP. Also find me @LightSplashes on Instagram or Facebook and we can have a wee chat there and put some social back into social media. Feel free to share your photography adventures by tagging @LightSplashes.
"Learning to draw means learning to see" - Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. "Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time." - Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw I knew about blind contour drawing before my vision loss. Didn't practice it much because, you know, perfectionism. It took a pretty drastic loss of vision to recognise the pointlessness of perfectionism, so once I could see again, I was ready to give it another try, which was fortunate, because my "normal" way of drawing didn't work any more. Something happened to the eye-brain-hand connection when vision was temporarily in abeyance and then monocular for a while. Even when I couldn't read the top single letter on the eye chart, there was enough handwriting muscle memory left for me to sign my name and write shopping lists, but, during the period of lost vision and recovery, somehow the connections that allowed me to draw and paint (and compose a reasonable shot through the lens) became scrambled. I could see all the leaves in detail as we drove along tree-lined streets, I could count every blade of grass and read ALL the number plates and signs (out loud!) but so far as actually making pictures went, I had to learn to see all over again. I started out with crayons and coffee cups. More on that another time. I went back to Betty Edwards' classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and some advice about getting back to basics from Danny Gregory and decided to give blind contour drawing another shot, too.
It's also calming. It can be a mindful, meditative practice. We're all about mindfulness these days. When it's hard to slow down and meditation is challenging, the blind contour focus on observation and slow drawing offers us a way into a calmer state. So long as we can let go of perfectionism. Blind contour drawing helps with that too. Knowing in advance that the result is likely to be weird and wonky, we can get comfortable with making mistakes, learn that an eraser is not necessarily our friend and enjoy plenty of "happy accidents".
Often, I find blind contour (and non-dominant hand) drawings can have a certain spirit, personality and vibrance that isn't always present in careful attempts at rendering realism. Even when they resemble a car crash!
Want to know more? You could go down the Google rabbit hole, but I recommend author Austin Kleon's thoughts on blind contour drawing as a good starting point and for people who work with little people, grab some ideas from Sarah Krajewski .
Would love to see your blind contour practice. Feeling brave enough to share? Tag @lightsplashes on Instagram or Facebook. Just have fun with it "What photography is, is life lit up" - Sam Abell.
How do we do it? (We're often asked!) No problem. Gear packed the night before, travel mugs on the bench ready with tea bags, layer upon layer of clothes ready to climb into. (It's still a bit brisk in the mornings). Swimming gear in case we're inspired to take a (bracing!) dip. Actually, it's much like getting the family to squad training, minus post-training breakfast of Weetbix, bananas and the litre of milk. Oh and with the added excitement of missing a crucial turn-off and turning the last part of the drive into a race to the chosen location to beat the sunrise. Sometimes words might be said. Fortunately watching sunrises improves moods and reduce stress, so generally all is forgiven when Sol is properly up and it's coffee and egg-and-bacon roll time. (This may be what's impacting the weight loss - or lack thereof!).
He’s chased many sunrises, not just as a photographer, but as a swimming parent, and swimming coach (occasionally even a swimmer himself), not to mention all the 0.Dark.Hundred shifts on school camps. And road trips. Did I mention many, many sunrises on road trips? Every one a new challenge. Speaking of challenges, check out the black and white image in the slideshow below. It was a bit of a cloudy sunrise at Bilgola yesterday. Sometimes even the sunrise looks better in black and white! It's a little late, (hey, I got up early yesterday!) but my thought for this Fathers Day was that 'father' is not just a noun, but a verb. A doing word, as the school kidlets say. Let's continue to celebrate and appreciate all those doing it. Sydney ocean pools preview "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." - Henry David Thoreau, (although I've read some arguments that he didn't write exactly those words). What do I see? When I'm out and about in the landscape I see art. I see colour and texture, shapes and lines, expansive views and tiny details, connections and compositions. The art in nature invites me, invites us, to slow down. To be still. To re-establish connection. I was reminded how much what I see matters when, for a while, I couldn't see much of any of it. Long story short: persistent doctors were able to 'crack the code' to treat my recurrent and mysterious eye condition and vision is restored! There aren't enough synonyms in the thesaurus for 'grateful'! So now, when I work (and play) with acrylic paints, watercolours, oil pastels, and my cameras, every photograph, sketch and painting is a celebration. As an artist and photographer with an educator background, of course, it's all about the learning. Learning to see. It never stops. (I'll natter on about that in future posts.) Yesterday, I listened to artist, illustrator and author, Dub Leffler give a Book Week talk, explaining to fascinated primary students that each piece of art he creates is a learning experience, from tiny quick sketches in a journal to final paintings for book illustration, and each one is practice for the next one. (Go check him out, by the way. Read your kids some of the books he's worked on!)
We'd better start with some introductions. I'm Kathy, the "Author" over there in the right sidebar. Behind the Light Splashes lenses with me are Moreno and Kieran. I'm often found at an easel as well. (Not in that white jacket though!) Photography informs my art practice which in turn transforms how I look through a lens. It's all learning to see, and noticing where the light splashes. To keep the black and white theme going, here's Moreno, from April this year, with a couple of photographers' models, who rocked up as soon as they saw the camera come out at Evans Lookout in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. And above, that's Kieran, testing out a new Nikon in Kiama, on a wintry August day.
The LightSplashes photography collections are our "postcards from home" (wherever we lay our hats). View and shop collections in the Gallery. From the mountains to the sea, we chase sunrises, and seek out the art in nature: light and shadow, colour, texture, line and shape, celebrating the stunning vistas and intricate details of our landscape. We'd love to hear from you, but please be patient if your blog comment doesn't appear immediately. Can't be online 24/7, so comments are moderated and require approval. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at the social links below. The first post is always the hardest. Let's get it out of the way. A few years ago I wrote a Haiku about putting stuff out there in the wild world - it still applies today.
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AuthorLight Splashes is a family affair, but it's me (Kathy) who'll do most of the banging on in the blog. (Important Photograhy Tip 1: Selfies always look better in black & white). Archives
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