We spent the day in a clearing in the park, sat in a circle on camping mats
with our art equipment and lunch stored under a tree. There was a series of
exercises
exploring different aspects of making art, and on this occasion the spiritual
aspect seemed to be mainly about trust and openness.
The standout for the day, for me, was the blindfolding/textures/other senses
exercise. This was a paired exercise in which we were supposed to take a blindfolded
person to a part of the park we had chosen, where they could explore without
seeing, and then return to base and make some art based on what they had experienced.
The idea was that we would respond to our surroundings or our perceptions of
them and make some art based on senses other than the visual, which is presumably
unusual for most of us.
I had a momentary flicker of alarm when I realised I would have to touch someone
I hardly knew to lead them across the clearing, and our trip of 100m descended
into farce when a family blundered in and decided they wanted to picnic in
front of the exact tree I’d had in mind for our destination. Fortunately
there was another silver birch nearby with ivy growing up its trunk.
When it was my turn I found I felt perfectly safe. The place I was exploring
was full of textures, not much in the way of smell, and the occasional sound,
mostly children’s voices carrying on the breeze, which reminded me of how
I’d focus on something as a child and barely hear other children playing
around me while I concentrated on what I was looking at, reading or drawing.
The main revelation, though, was a series of flower heads I touched, which
felt incredibly soft, floppy and silky, almost too fragile to resist the wind.
The
contrast in texture was fascinating: bark chips underfoot, a plant with very
rough stems, leaves which felt matt and very thick and uniform. I did not feel
self-conscious about walking right into a big rounded plant as tall as I was
to explore it thoroughly, something which I would not have done if I were drawing
it from a few feet away.
When we re-assembled to make our art it was freeing in many ways, and I didn’t
get too precious about my watercolour being blown away if I let go for a moment,
or visited by bugs which crawled over the paper plates we were using as palettes.
I think this experience is going to lead to another way of abstracting from
the purely documentary in my future art.
If I had any suggestions for future changes to the format, I would encourage
the leaders to increase the time spent in art activities at the expense of
the fairly long time taken up by acclimatisation exercises like standing in
a circle
calling people’s names while throwing them a ball. For me at least, rapport
built up much better when talking over lunch than in this initial session.
At the end of the day a “time capsule” from the previous year was
opened up, and people who had attended before received a letter they had written
for themselves last summer. This year, we all made some art to remind ourselves
of summer, to be posted in the winter. I like the idea of a reminder of a special
day or time coming back later to prompt me to see what changes I have made
and what promises I have kept.