This month I am going to (try) and blog a little blogginess each day, inspired by the beautiful Susannah Conway (Ink on My Fingers) #augustbreak2022 prompts. While I might normally respond to prompts like these on a (previously) much adored photo sharing platform, changes there have lead me to embrace this platform instead with much enthusiasm - we can talk to each other with much less noise and distraction here, don’t you think? You won't receive an email for each one, I don’t want to be spamming your inbox like mad, but they will be here for you to look at when you are called to, and I will link the posts I make in our weekly missive. Some of these little notes may small. Some may be longer. I am not making and rules for myself here, but being open to see what comes up with each prompt.
If you want to join along, leave me a comment on Substack, or reply to this email - I would love to know what comes up for you with each prompt too!
Today’s prompt is morning light.
It is only in the last few years that I have really noted my relationship to the morning, though I have since a child been a sparrow, rising with the sun or just before, keen (mostly) to start the day. These last couple of years, and now that my creative practice has become my day job as well as the tie that binds me to this beauty called Earth, I look forward to the sun rising for what it means in my studio (where you will find me at all hours of the day and night). To see the morning light flicker low in winter between murraya leaves, casting their shadow on to my desk as I write my morning pages, and at the right height to make my eyes water. Or in summer high above my window line, orange even in the early hours, stark and harsh and telling tales of fiery heat to come.
(our furry friends will always find time to embrace the enchantment of morning light)
Earlier this year I made a little course that explored ways to be creatively present each day, and some of the prompts revolved around shadows, noticing them, using them to create art, being open to the wonder of light creating magical, ethereal facsimiles, and I find I am drawn to take photos of these particular manifestations of morning light in particular. I love to see them splashed over my work surface, creating movement on top of static pigment on paper. A manifestation of ‘aliveness’, a reminder that the world is in constant flux, that nothing around us stops moving just because we aren’t paying attention. I trace my eye around the shapes cast, sometimes I place a piece of paper down and trace the shadows with pencil. Organic and otherworldly.
My studio’s window is north facing, so the sun is bright in here all day (southern hemisphere, don’t forget), but in the morning, particularly late autumn and winter, there is a mystical, liminal aspect to the light hitting desktop and carpet as scattered ellipses of sunlight, perfect little shadow shapes of the sun directed through evergreen leaves. I write in my journal under the soft movement of shadow leaves. My girls (kitties) lay in the beam of warmth that extends through my studio doorway and into the hall and living room. There is a fluidity to the morning light seen this way, it dances in the faint breeze, it kisses parts of my winter chilled skin with subtle sunny heat. It is really rather mesmerising, if I allow myself to be open and present and notice.
I am reminded to take a breath, and embrace enchantment.
“In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.”
~ Hans Hofmann
May you embrace enchantment today, too.
xo Natalie
Morning Light