Something big, something slow

Creating beauty takes time

Something BIG is coming to your inbox on Saturday. My Saturday. Depending on where you are, it may be your Friday. We are in the future here in the Antipodes (and today the future is bright).

Suffice to say I am excited, nervous, giddy with joy of the potential of it all. There is a rather marvellous shift coming to the paid subscriber area here - and it involves a very slight increase in cost. Those already signed up before I make the change stay at the slightly lower rate - so if you are looking to get in on the ground level (let’s call it the forest floor) sign up now. It will be so worth it, I promise.

I even put a button here for you, see?

But more about that on Saturday.

Today, I want to talk about going slow. Slooooowww. I have been an advocate for, and a very poor participant in, the concept of slow living for a long time. Despite being entirely philosophically and spiritually aligned with the basic tenets of living a slow, reverential, purposeful life, being an active (and willing - I always thrived on collecting gold stars) participant in the entrenched capitalist/product and productivity focused society so many of us are a part of, has been a jarring juxtaposition that has not served my physical or mental health well. I suspect many of you are nodding your heads in recognition and agreement. And probably like me, you often find yourself in a disconnected, distracted, almost fugue-like state, stepping back onto that treadmill, unwittingly, unwillingly.

I have carried a vision of what my perfect slow, intentional, grounded life looks like, what I want to walk towards, since I made the decision to be a creative full time. Since I tentatively took one foot off the aforementioned treadmill. It is beautiful. It is wild. It has a lot of what

Sara Tasker - Me & Orla

talks about in her latest post on living her own dreams (and oh how I celebrate other reaching their dreams, no matter what that looks like). It involves a lot of rest, a lot of ritual, a lot of my hands in the earth. My hands covered in paint and charcoal dust. A lot of cups of tea sitting among the flowers and vegetables in my garden, time for thinking, time for reading, time to watch the dance of the wild. And time, still, to work hard on the things I am here to do, among which is to be a voice for and sing the song of the wild through pushing pigment around. In reality though, rather than my middle name being Joy, I think it is actually Overwhelm. Or Self-Impossed-Pressure (do people have hyphenated middle names?). The only time, the only time, that I ground into slow, deliberate, intentional, without consciously making myself do it, is when I am at my easel or writing, and even then, only when working on something truly aligned with my purpose. Not something I think I should be doing because someone I gave too much credo to said I should. In those moments or aligned work, time slows down, there is a lifting of weight, and the sense of possibility, of magic, is profound. My breath is light, my shoulders lower, and I feel connected in a way that is all but impossible otherwise. I may even remember to light that candle that I keep meaning to do to ritualise my work.

In her Art and Mental Health Link Love,

Kathryn Vercillo

writes beautifully about this, and so much more:

Over those years I also did plenty of “my own writing” including blogs and books and articles about things that I was passionate about. It has always been a balance of paying the bills and doing the creative work. But over the years, my patience with the low paying content churning work ran out. And I thought it was me. I thought it was depression. I thought it was burnout. It was a bit of those things but it wasn’t just that and it’s a lot bigger than me. There’s a systemic problem with gig work, with freelancing and independent contracting … with the ongoing difficulty of supporting yourself as a creative doing truly creative work that you care about.

Go read all her posts, seriously.

Here in this missive, I want to talk a little about slow from the lens of an artist that creates highly detailed, realistic work. And how I keep tripping myself up in the trap of worth as product.

This work I do is slow. It is so slow. And I have found myself thinking about that a lot this last week working on a new series of barn owl and botanicals works in graphite. I keep thinking I should be able to finish a piece each day. To get all 5 pieces up for sale before the end of the week and pray someone buys one because Seraphina needs her arthritis injections and I need to pay the mortgage, and there is only me and my two hands. But the first one took me 32 hours. I don’t know about you, but in my house a day only lasts 24 hours, and I don’t think I could physically hold a pencil and work for 32 hours straight anyway. The longest I have work at once without any real break with a pencil was about 8 hours. That was tough on my hand, and I want to be able to do this for the rest of my life, and not be broken after a week. With that in mind, the following is not a whinge (or mayhap there is a little of that), it is an observation from me of this moment in time, where I am right now, about working slow and feeling the pressure of not doing enough, quickly enough.

Nearly three quarters of decade on social media as a creative has lead to myself and a lot of artists who work slowly feeling so burnt out by an expectation of content creation, performative sharing, and a churning out of more and more and more to feed the maw of those dangerous and deleterious constructs that are behind our social structures. Those machines that value output above all else. Interestingly, this happens in tandem with a generalised mass devaluing of creativity, of hand made art in a burgeoning digital and AI landscape. The expectation that it should be given freely and willingly at the literal expense of being able to make a living wage, and ripe with dismissive commentary of ‘relevance’ or upset of traditional hierarchy and expectation. I mean, this is literally what all the writers and actors strikes are about.

Emma Gannon

recently shared a post asking if we are over social media . There has been a lot of this discussed on Notes here too. So much of me wants to say YES I AM, but then there is that squirmy sense of attachment, a tethering that somehow has me questioning if my work (and indeed if I, myself) can be relevant without Instagram (my social media drug of choice). How will I grow my audience? How will I find my collectors? When in reality very very few of my collectors have come through that platform, and for goodness sake Natalie, social media is a very recent invention, artists have thrived without it for millennia. The dopamine hit works well on me, it seems - like collecting figurative (and physical) gold stars, I have allowed my worth, and the worth of my work, to be wrapped up in likes and follows, like a starved animal grateful for tiny morsels. Gold stars and scraps in one sentence - mixing metaphors is a skill.

My work is slow. Attention spans have been getting shorter and shorter (hello, that is me too). These two are in opposition to an expansive and abundant mindset around creativity and creative entrepreneurship for some of us. Something I have come to recognise is particularly problematic for me is hyper-lapses or sped up video content of painting/drawing. I am guilty of this, many, many times over. It feeds into that insatiable need for rapidly digestible content (like junk food), but it minimises the work in such detrimental ways. It enforces an expectation that this work is quick and consumable and, perhaps, of limited value. Have you ever noticed so much of the roadside rubbish seems to be takeaway bags and drink containers from McDonalds and KFC? It is not valued, not considered (leading to a lack of consideration). It is only interesting until the next reel of something similar, or a cat (and let me tell you, I am here for all the cat memes, always). I am making broad and sweeping statements. I hope you catch my drift.

Earlier this year I did a blacksmithing workshop with my dad and my brothers. Spending time with them like that was worth so much more than money can buy (maybe don’t tell them that), but it was also an incredible opportunity to revel in the complexity and nuance of being a skilled artisan. It had me considering how much humans need that connective, skill development, and creation of something beautiful and maybe functional - either doing it, or witnessing it. I spent hours beating the living daylights out of a little lump of steel and ended up with a blacksmith’s knife that I am inordinately proud of and that sits above my computer where I am typing. I was sore and dirty after it, but also proud and in more than a little awe, and deeply appreciative of those that take the time to learn these traditional skills and teach them with such reverence and compassion. I asked myself so many questions around how what I experienced and the way it made me feel could be applied to my own work. At the end of the workshop day I had a functional knife that could literally be used to cut things - food, paper, wood, my own fingers if I didn’t pay attention. It has a usefulness, a relevance. How can I apply that to my artwork?

What I create has relevance because it is a voice for the wild. I sing the songs, through pigment, of our other-than-human kin. I explore the connection of our wild hearts and our forgotten but deep-seated archetypes and the wild we were born into millennia ago. The wild that we grew up as a part of not apart from like we seem to be now. I manifest these honourings in a way that I can share with you, and you can connect your own wild heart to. That if you purchase a painting or a print you get to feast your eyes on forever, that you also become empowered to re-wild, to be reminded of the wild outside (and inside) and be inspired to connect, to root down, to unfurl, to celebrate the profound beauty we are surrounded by. To not feel lost and separate from those we walk the Earth with anymore (for those of us far removed from our indigeneity). With a piece of artwork, you have a physical, tangible thing, and you also have so much more than that.

We all take part in this consumerist society in degrees, and we all have need of utilitarian and mass-produced. I don’t think we can function in a modern society without it. But I think more and more of us are becoming disillusioned with the magic of “modern life” and deeply miss our very human ability to manifest wonder and beauty, as we become more and more surrounded by ‘stuff’ that has no meaning. Stuff that we are led to believe we ‘need’ or ‘must have’, that doesn’t have a story or the indelible print of a human that created this with heart on it. We know mass production and mass consumption is killing us. And not just us. It is killing the wild.

Ok. So this piece of writing became a lot more serious than I expected when I started it. But I guess it is serious, to me as a creative, as a wild-hearted human.

I don’t know what the answer is.

I suspect there is not one answer that we can tie up in a bow. I am not an expert in anything other than me, and sometimes I wonder if I am even an expert at that. Social media alone is not the big bad, not in this context, I don’t think. Is it harmful, yes, I think so, to varying degrees. But we are the participants, right? And I only have my own opinion, I have not done the research to write a dissertation on it all (there are many skilled people who have though). I do know that these platforms are free, and we are under no obligation other than what we expect of ourselves. I know I personally have made some incredibly precious connections there that my life would be so much poorer without. I have also had some gross propositions from men that have left me shaken, and some unkind words I could do without. We can leave. We can stay and be a part of change, or just play - there is no right or wrong. We need to do what is best for our own individual experience, and we need to be supportive of those looking to do things differently. And we can change our minds, it is our prerogative. We can be nuanced. In fact I think that is a lot of what is missing overall (*sweeps hands wildly around in circles*) - nuance. We don’t need permission from someone else, we can extend that to ourselves.

I don’t see myself leaving Instagram just now, though my relationship to it has fundamentally changed over the last year or so. But my relationship to sooo much has changed over this last year of profound grief and fear and hardship. I recognise that in order to create my best work I cannot constantly consume the work of others. But I do want to share my work - I want to inspire and delight. I want to be inspired and delighted. I want to celebrate slow, and so when I share over there now I only share snippets of real time working, or still pictures. I may put a few of those together, but you won’t see me speeding my way through a creation from start to finish. Similarly, I always enjoyed making long and thoughtful captions for my posts, which were rarely seen, but I have here now for that - and so far, I am finding Substack to be deliciously conducive to slow. So I will still be on the ‘gram for now, when I want to, when it feels like fun. I am going to be here a whole lot more now though. I felt a strange urge to tac “I’m sorry” to the end of that sentence.

So, in celebration of slow, here is 10 minutes of me working on a single tiny puffball. You are welcome.

I hope you can celebrate slow today, that you can use your hands and your heart and feel grounded and, well, alive with the possibility of it all.