Much Food for Thought –
This week was a real ‘food for thought’ week. We started our meeting with a presentation from the Post Grad Community Team, who gave a very informative talk about what they they do and the weekly newsletter they create. I am really interested in a number of the items they spoke about including: a Post Grad Ambassador role and a potential residency. My heart is saying yes apply, but my head is asking how feasible is a residency when I’m juggling both work and a young teen. Sadly, I don’t think she (the young teen) would like it very much if I disappeared for a few weeks especially during her GCSE year. But I’m the eternal optimist so I’ll never say never.
Before I begin to work through our session today this afternoon, here is today’s Zentangle doodle. If you would like to see all of these weekly images to date, here is the blog post where I am curating them.
Today’s Zentagle
Imagination
This week much of our discussion revolved around ‘imagination’. In our small group (it was nice to see some familiar faces) we chatted about what curtails imagination for us. Personally I feel that we are living in very constrained times. For example if I wanted to paint my front room ‘sky blue pink with dots’, I know that my friends and colleagues would think I was very strange! I think this is why I find my little zentangle drawings such a nice little indulgence. I feel they are a reflection of how I’m feeling. Or should I say the type of mark making is a reflection of how I’m feeling on any given day.
Last week I used quite bold strokes. I suspect I was feeling quite confident about something or other. This week I was concentrating heavily on the conversations I was having. Therefore this week’s zentangle is much more reflective of a rapid thought process with more ‘swirly’ lines.
In answer to the question what limits my imagination, then that has to be me. I sub-titled this blog post as ‘food for thought’. I have decided, as an exercise I am going to let my imagination wander for a few minutes, then write down some thoughts. I hope to make my thoughts highly imaginary. The resulting text I will feed into Ai. I will document my findings at the end of this post. I am just curious to see where my imagination takes me.
We also talked about ‘Resentment’ which comes from the French – ‘sentir’ and the Latin ‘sentire’ which means ‘to feel’. Like the word ‘resentment’ it comprises re-sense – therefore resentment could mean experiencing or feeling something again and again. I’m not sure that resentment is something I currently experience in life? This is largely down to age and my philosophy that things happen ‘for you’ as opposed to – ‘to you’. I find life and it’s challenges much easier to deal with if you treat every hiccup in life as a learning experience. Indeed, sometimes when we look back we can often see that negative events are often required for more positive things to happen but I digress.
In our groups we were asked to discuss the following questions:
* What blocks our imagination?
* What do you think ‘existential creativity’ might look like in your art practice?
I have already touched on the answer to the first question. I believe that the only thing currently limiting my imagination is me. I am self limiting it because of societal norms, pressures and expectations. I really would like to let my imagination run riot! But sadly I’d probably get arrested (only joking), although I think I could come up with some quite radical ideas. Question two is harder to answer because it involves the word ‘existential’. This is how I am defining it, for the purposes of answering the question.
”Existentialism is the philosophical belief we are each responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our own lives. Our individual purpose and meaning is not given to us by Gods, governments, teachers or other authorities”.
I could write something here just to write something, but honestly, at this point in time I haven’t got a clue! I am going to take time out to consider this and I will hopefully have something to write in my next ‘Reflective’ blog post.
Tomorrow and then again next week I will be making trips to London for both work and leisure, so there may be a little gap in my writing for a while. However, in the meantime, please see below for my ‘imaginative’ ideas brought to life with a little help from my Ai friend. I’ve included the prompts at the bottom of each image incase you would like to try them for yourself.
