DREAMING ...

When I was a child, if someone called you a "dreamer" it wasn't a compliment!  It meant a failure to concentrate, to be fully present, or something like that.  Now I think that the world would be an infinitely poorer place if there were no dreamers ... and that's what this page is about.  At least I think it is, I'm never sure these days!  If it says something else to you that's fine, and part of the magic.

It began with me making blobby shapes on the page with my Caran D'Ache neocolour crayons - my favourite art material.  As you know, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with paint.  As ever I was challenging myself to push the boundaries of how I usually work, so hence a slightly off the wall colour combination ....

When I look at the basic page above, I STILL don't like it, and am mildly surprised that it didn't end up as one of those (admittedly few) that I eventually hate so much I tear them out.  But I didn't, and the urge to write on it came instead.

This was another of those times when the thought seemed to come out of nowhere, but the more I reflected on it the more important it seemed.  I know now that it is undoubtedly a message I was meant to receive (I know where from but you can make your own mind up about that).  I'd been thinking a lot about the necessity of laying down some of my long-time dreams and admitting that they were things which just weren't ever going to happen.  For example, in my teens I'd wanted desperately to go to art school, but my mother poured scorn on the very idea and sent me to learn shorthand typing instead.  Yeah right.  Not long ago my darling man said - well if you still want to, why don't you just GO? 

I thought about it, very hard indeed, but realised two things.  One was that I could no longer physically manage the demands of doing such a course, and so couldn't get the best out of it.  The second was the realisation that I genuinely didn't need to - not that I don't have much to learn, because I do, but perhaps I already am the artist I was meant to become?  That was SO liberating, and allowed me to let go of the anger I'd nursed for too long about my youthful dreams being so carelessly squashed. 

So this is the finished page - quite a simple one for me, and the doodling very restrained!  The other thing I learned from this exercise was that when you let go of old dreams which are no longer relevant to the person you now are, it makes a space for new ones to come in .....  I wish I'd understood that earlier in my life, but in some areas I'm a slow learned!

I still don't like these colours, or the blobby shapes, very much, but the beauty of art journalling is in how it is able to release things that need to be expressed or let go of, so this page is precious to me - not because it is beautiful, but because of what doing it released and enabled within me.

We had a fabulous holiday in New England, but its rather nice to be home again ....