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“All things must change to something new to something strange”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Back in September we had a bit of a SEVEN makeover. First the lovely Nicola announced she could no longer balance work, life and SEVEN. Then we completely reimagined what we were doing. Big time.

Problem was, by January we were feeling a little lost…

Looking to our art past

For our first two years showing in the Leigh Art Trail we’d shown creative sketchbooks completed using a series of artistic prompts, while using similar materials. In 2017 the theme had been the sea, in 2018 it was ‘estuarine’.

The key had been to see how seven different artists interpreted the same prompts and utilised those similar materials in their work.

But for LAT 2019 we wanted to do something different…

Looking to Leigh Art Trail 2019

So we shook things up. Big time:

• Goodbye trusty concertina sketchbook, hello handmade journal!
• No more unifying theme – instead, each SEVEN member took an artist or art movement for inspiration
• We each sourced our own materials
• And, we threw out the individually-led workshops

Yep, we had pretty much changed everything.

SEVEN become five

Added to which, by Christmas, the accomplished Kerry Doyland was considering her future with the group – Kerry has her fingers in a lot of artistic pies, including a passion for figure painting and a part in Leigh-on-Sea’s Two Tree Gallery – so it was looking like SEVEN was about to be five.

A lesson learned

Change is part of life. And SEVEN collective is no different. But when it came to the self-imposed changes we’d made to the way we worked in our art journals we’d probably made a tad too many.

Without a clear creative compass – a set book, shared materials, or group workshops where we exchanged our favourite techniques – we’d become a bit lost.

Can we pull SEVEN back from the brink of blank sketchbook doom? Or even worse, for those of us who haven’t decided on what shape or size of sketchbook to make, will there simply be a void where a book should be (eeek!)? Let’s wait and see…

So, this December the intrepid Kerry Doyland, from Two Tree Gallery, a small space run by a group of Leigh artists, met a woman who wanted a piece of art reimagined. That’s a task for SEVEN Kerry told her. And, that’s how we got our first commission…

Old for new

Our mission – should we choose to accept it – was to rework a piece of art which had been bought in memory of a relative. A kind of collage-inspired work, with a vintage feel, the image featured lots of delicate heart-shapes in very muted tones.

With that in mind, every SEVEN member was given a section of the original work. Now all we had to do was:

• Respond to the original artwork in our own unique ways, working on small individual canvases.

The unifying threads were:

• The heart detail – which the client was keen to retain
• The colour palette of black, white, grey, yellow and gold

Once completed the small canvases would be framed together to form a complete piece.

Our collaborative creation

And the results were kinda interesting. Amanda told us her figurative take was inspired by the opening credits of her current fave show Vikings – what else!? While Helen looked to some of her enduring themes, like hands and gloves for inspiration:

“It seemed pretty apt to me, evoking ideas of nostalgia and connection,” she said.

SEVEN’s work usually centres around the creative process, so it was a real challenge to get together and create a finished piece. The result was something unique and completely unexpected. Is this the start of something new for SEVEN? Will we be taking more commissions in the future? We’ll see…

This art year SEVEN threw out the idea of a unifying theme for our Leigh Art Trail sketchbooks. For 2019 we’d make art books and take inspiration from an artist or art movement we loved.

So:

• Jo turned to Hundertwasser;

• Kim chose Robert Rauschenberg;

• Juliet looked to Oceanic art;

• Amanda chose Matisse;

• And, Helen would get inspired by Surrealism.

So far, so interesting. But isn’t that kinda stealing?

Steal like an artist

Have you ever read the Austin Kleon book Steal Like an Artist? If you’re interested in stretching your creative muscles this short book is for you. As Kleon writes:

Every artist gets asked the question:

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

The honest artist answers,”I steal them.”

But shouldn’t art be original?

Well, good luck if you think you can come up with something original in a vacuum. Kleon goes on to say:

“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

The key is to start now

Don’t get tempted to wait for the muse to strike you with that lightning bolt of inspiration. It’s not going to happen. Stuff happens when you start doing.

As Austin Kleon shares:

“If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started “being creative,” well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.”

Remember the Laughing Gnome?

So discovering our own groove is a key reason to look back at the art that inspires us. Even an artistic original like David Bowie took a while to find the kind of music and performing style which suited him.

Before he became the Bowie we know and love he had some famous flops like The Laughing Gnome which was inspired by his then hero Anthony Newley (co-writer of the film score for 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). But Bowie had to do that to discover who he really was.

Keen to explore your creative roots? Austin Kleon advises looking to your own art family tree.

Find out more about Austin Kleon.

In the meantime SEVEN will see where this exploration of our own art family trees takes us…

September marked a new term and some new approaches for SEVEN Collective. Following the Leigh and Southend Art Trails we had a think. Was our sketchbook collective going the way we wanted? Some people reckoned not…

Plus, check out our mind-bending idea-generating tip at the end of this post – it’s pretty out there, see what you make of it!

Time to bin the concertina?

One key area of contention were the sketchbooks themselves. While we were all committed to the journal format, someone asked:

“Do the journals have to be concertina in format?”

Then we got on a roll…

“Do the books have to be A5?”

“Why not smaller?“

“Or bigger?“

Then we got really daring…

“Couldn’t we just do something altogether different?“

New themes

“Like what?” some of us said.

“Like, choose our own theme under a kind of umbrella heading…“

“Yes! We could each work with a different colour!“

“Err, no. What if you got lumped with putrid pink or blah brown?“

They had a point.

So we considered taking a favourite book as a starting point. It seemed to go down well. Nods and murmurs of approval all round. Then a small voice confessed:

“Words just don’t inspire me.“

Hey ho. Back to the drawing board, then…

“By jove, I’ve got it! How about a favourite artist or art movement?“

“YES!” *Whoops and air punches*

And, so it was agreed. Our Leigh Art Trail creative journals for 2019 would be based on the umbrella theme of an artist or art movement, but it was up to us to choose exactly who we’d like to explore…

New journals

No people, we couldn’t let it go at that. Now we might as well go the whole nine yards.  While we were branching out on themes, couldn’t we just, like, make our own books from scratch?

Yep, that’s right. Make our own unique journals. From. Scratch. What could possibly go wrong?! Watch this space…

New ideas

And, to get us into the back-to-sketchbook-school swing we decided to play around with some idea-generating prompts courtesy of musician Brian Eno.

Eno’s Oblique Strategies were introduced to us by artist Heidi Wigmore when we attended her creative journaling classes back in the day. Now, we were turning to them as a suitably mind-blowing way to get our SEVEN creative juices flowing for the new project ahead.

Check out the Oblique Strategies generator for gems like: ‘Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic’

I know! Right!?

Just where will all these new ideas take SEVEN, our creative journals, and you?