Butterfly mornings writing “Mona’s Work”

January 4, 2010January 13, 2010 / Terrill Welch / 8 Comments

With my toes wiggling under the same wool blanket that my mother made me for my birthday one year, I look at the photo of my painted toes from several summers ago. From present, to mid-life to childhood, I’m drawn back into my memories of my grandmother Mona. I began writing Mona’s Work in September 2007. I need to finish it. Today is a writing day.

I allow the blanket made in colours gathered from one of my gardens to drift me back to a place full of butterfly mornings…and wild flower afternoons.

I’m back where the hay is being cut in the field and I am making potato salad with my grandmother using new potatoes, radishes and green onions from her garden. I leave you here to enjoy this beautiful song by Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions off of “Bavarian Fruit Bread”, as I go off to my day of writing.

Sprout Question: What objects and memories do you keep close to spark your creativity?

Liberal usage granted with written permission. See “About” for details.

Purchase photography at http://www.redbubble.com/people/terrillwelch

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.

Surprised Oil Painting

January 3, 2010January 13, 2010 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

My photo shoot yesterday produced mixed results in the low and uneven afternoon light. However, sitting quietly with one of the images, during the editing process, lead me down an interesting path. After several turns, a shoreline photo is transformed into a black and white oil painting of Bennett Bay on Mayne Island.

View the full resolution of Bennett Bay Mayne Island here.

When we are prepared to be surprised and allow an image to call us forward, not just in the beginning of the creative process but all the way to the end, sometimes magic happens. I almost through this original photo image away even though I liked the composition because the mood was different than I wanted. But I just couldn’t get myself to press the delete button and I started to play with the image instead. First, I made the image black and white (as it was almost there already). Then I used a simple program to change it into an oil painting – nothing complicated, just editing tools I had at hand. With a bit more fine tuning, I now have an image that is no longer “really” a photo or ‘really” an oil painting. Setting these judgments aside – I am happy with the end results.

Sprout Question: What creative process might you try if you set your initial judgment about what is legitimate “creative work” aside?

Liberal usage granted with written permission. See “About” for details.

Purchase photography at http://www.redbubble.com/people/terrillwelch

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.

Unfolding Image

January 2, 2010January 13, 2010 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

Do you too carry a tension between placing your bum-to-seat, setting to work, and that of placing yourself in the proximity to your inspiration and allowing your work to unfold? I find there is a place for both in creativity.

View the full resolution of Arbutus Puzzle here .

Like the image Arbutus Puzzle, the beauty and strength is in the over and under of the creative tension between purpose and approach.

What pulls this working tension into creative bliss is the certainty of what is not yet know. With either approach, I must show up – fully. I must be ready to set aside other distractions, and other thought processes. Yet, the cast-aside thoughts and emotions will appear deep in the images that are captured or created. They are the under workings of my muse. In that I trust.

Today is a bum-to-seat morning. I am clearing my painting table in the studio to paint when daylight comes.

[Updated 11:23 am PST with progress from inside the studio]

Many times in the creative process it is not about getting “it right” but rather about “getting it started.”

This afternoon I shall place myself under the trees be they wet or dry and allow the images to call me forth.

Sprout Question: What is your approach to an unfolding image today?

Liberal usage granted with written permission. See “About” for details.

Purchase photography at http://www.redbubble.com/people/terrillwelch

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.

Full Blue Moon New Years Eve

December 31, 2009January 13, 2010 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

Today is New Years eve. This year it is a full moon and a blue moon(2nd full moon in December). May we reach into this time of annual renewal with appreciation for our creativity and our imaginations.

View full resolution at here.

Sprout Question: What is your creative wish for the New Year?

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.

The Great Blue Heron and creativity

December 29, 2009January 2, 2010 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

View full resolution at http://www.redbubble.com/people/terrillwelch/art/4375903-2-great-blue-heron

I share the Great Blue Heron with us today. The heron is a bird of patience, fishing for hours to catch its dinner. It is graceful as it sits, and often awkward when it takes flight — with the most retched voice, reminding me of prehistoric times. I find it unfortunate that such a beautiful bird has such a horrible song. Yet that strange song echos and has us looking around to see where it is coming from. Meanwhile the heron, in its awkwardness, takes flight and flies to safety. I love the heron for reminding me that in order to love a part of myself (or another) I must live and accept the whole and learn when to be still, when to sing and when to fly.

I gift us the heron to remind us that we are not one thing or one way all of the time in our creativity – and there is a reason… even if we can’t see that reason in the moment.

Sprout Question: How do you acknowledge and honour the different parts of yourself in your creativity?

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.

Tide receding

December 29, 2009January 13, 2010 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

As the tide recedes over the sandstone, two o’clock in the afternoon feels like evening in the late December sky.

View Tide Receding in full resolution here http://www.redbubble.com/people/terrillwelch/art/4370691-1-receding-tide

Wandering the shoreline with seagulls crying out their finds, I am at peace on this Christmas day 2009. Now, a few days later I come back to this scene and I’m reminded of that moment.

Sprout Question: What might express specific moments of peace in your life?

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.

A gown remembered: Beginning

December 27, 2009January 2, 2010 / Terrill Welch / 3 Comments

My work, my oeuvre: in the peripheral shadows, too remote for distress, yet relentlessly haunting me. I remember small children wrapped in warmth and tucked away from the soft sounds of a mop I swished across the floor. I knew that I should sleep. The thought of a pristine surface for their bare feet to scuttle across was too hard to resist. My paid work day is done, yet I continued feverishly while my limbs ached with fatigue. These days too are like that. I wrestle each minute of each hour to give me more than it has to offer. I grab between care-giving and caring and wolf down the seconds with a phone call to a colleague, a note of thank you for a review of my book, and draft a response to a request for an article. With blessings duly given, I write a paragraph. A paragraph that is like slipping on an evening gown without undergarments, standing on bare toes, and swirling the hem once in front of the long mirror. Then hastily letting it drop around my ankles, stepping out, and hanging it with care before starting another load of laundry.

I am not begrudging or complaining or martyring my efforts. Rather, it is a battle of sorts – a war with the second-hand as it sashays around the clock’s surface, indifferent to the multiplicity of my love. I can’t stand the second-hand’s smugness. I nimbly waltz past as it releases one of its never-ending ticks. I turn on it. My piercing stare slices each second in three. Yes three. Then I coax my shadowy work-self out of the remote corners where she marauds beyond the reach of the second-hand. She needs to know that those she loves are cared for – out of danger, thriving. Then she will come on stage and dance until sweat glistens and streams in rivulets, more salt-laden and plentiful than tears. With quick, sure steps she does not wait for the music – every tired muscle, scar and softness of skin giving to you in her presence.

Sprout Question: What keeps your fingers to the keyboard, on the shutter button or picking up the paint brush?

Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.