seascape

Mayne Island Summer Group Show part 1

/ Terrill Welch / 17 Comments

A bright corner of Mayne Island is going to get even brighter on July 9, 2010 to September 1, 2010 with the opening of the Mayne Island Summer Group Show with work from about a dozen participants. Do you want to come? Yes I know, for some of you it is too far away. But for others it may be down the road or just a ferry ride for a weekend get away.

Most of you know, I live on the wee Mayne Island with about a 1,000 people year round and maybe 3,000 hanging around during the summer. These 23 square kilometers in the Southern Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada are home to a thriving art, artisan and writing community with its own arts council. The Mayne Island Trincomali Community Arts Council hosts a series of art exhibits at the Mayne Island Reading Room or “the library” throughout the year.

Whether you will be sipping wine and nibbling treats at the opening with us, between 7:00 and 9:00 pm in the heart of Miner’s Bay, on the evening of July 9th or you must suffice with my blog review, I hope you enjoy the offerings.

Here is a sneak preview…

Author and artisan Leanne Dyck has submitted a natural fiber art hand knit purse appropriately named “Summer Daze” that is begging to be slung over a shoulder and taken to a summer picnic. I laid it gently on this fir bow to photography. It appears to be right at home.

Quasimodo Pottery creates unique, extremely high quality craftsmanship and functional art in its pottery pieces. Here is a group image of pottery from their website.

The Quasimodo casserole dish was featured recently Creative Potager in the post “Quiet Grace.”

Artist and message therapist Shakeira Wynde’s vibrant abstract acrylic painting will fill the exhibit all by itself with its brilliant colours. She graciously allowed me to slip by her home and take this photo for our early viewing.

My oil painting “East Point Cliff” asked me to put her forward for her debut in the Mayne Island Summer Group Show as well.

As you can see, there is a diverse collection of work in the show. We will be back to take another glance behind the Mayne Island Summer Group show curtain next Saturday before the opening the following week.

And here it is, next week already. Please come on over to Mayne Island Summer Group Show part 2

If you are thinking of coming, the Mayne Island B.C. website (which also has a link to the Mayne Island Chamber of Commerce ) can help you with your planning.

Sprout Question: Where are you showing your creative pieces work this summer?

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

Eagle over the moon

/ Terrill Welch / 20 Comments

Through joyful tears and laughter the gifts are opened.

Friends prepare for a round of games. I slip outside, where clouds break, allowing slivers of evening sun and a rainbow across the way.

View full resolution and purchase image here.

The ocean is within touching distance and the tide is on the ebb, bringing a young eagle closer to shore – hunting.

View full resolution and purchase image here.

A bridal shower and an eagle over the moon – a good omen I think.

Sprout Question: Where has your creativity recently found something new in the familiar?

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

Far Shore oil painting

/ Terrill Welch / 24 Comments

18X24″ by 1 3/4″ water miscible oil painting on 100% natural cotton canvas

I worked on this west coast painting much of yesterday afternoon and into the early evening. At one point I move out onto the covered deck because the natural light had faded in my loft studio. I believe it is to the “tweaking” stage or almost or maybe even completely finished. It is resting now and I will begin another while it lingers in the great room as the day’s light passes overhead. I will peer at it every now and then with a critical eye. At a later point I will take another photo for my redbubble account.

As I was working I mused on a couple of ideas. The first is something my son said when we were talking about song writing. He commented on how sometimes it is best to leave a song and start a new one that will be better rather than try to fix one that is not working. I think this is true for most creative work. Our learning is cumulative. With a certain amount of detachment, we take the work as far as we can, then release it and start again. Drawings in sand, ice sculptures and cake decorating come to mind as ways we can make marks and practice creative detachment.

Speaking of making marks, this is something humans have been doing for a long time. These markings are telling not only of our present but of our past and our imagined future. There is a collective bandwidth of creativity with most creative work gathered around the centre and much less work being created along the margins or fringes. The great work of the fringes will sometimes move to the centre of the bandwidth and new work will develop along the margins. William Blake , Claude Monet, Walt Whitman come to mind as well-known artist who worked in the margins of their time and yet held our attention until their work became accepted and even revered, at which point their creative views and style moved into the centre of the creative bandwidth. This process of margin to centre has always fascinated me because some work just falls off the margins and disappears while other creative work is shuffled into the centre. Most of us work comfortably in the full rich stream of the centre. Only some of us are compelled to work in the margins. Work in the margins is often recognizable by the name calling – bad art, lacking technique, improper, breaking the rules and shocking.

Sprout Question: Where would you place your work on the current bandwidth of creativity?

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

More Painting

/ Terrill Welch / 23 Comments

Power outage lends itself to another day painting

We had another power outage (due to winds knocking over a huge arbutus tree on Village Bay road at 1:40 am). I awake at 7:00 am. The power is still out. I decide to see if I can find a coffee before doing anything else. Ah yes! The bakery is serving coffee using generator power. Armed with to-go thermos cups filled with black gold, I return home and prepare our usual fruit, yogurt and grain cereal for breakfast. With few alternatives, I settle on my favourite activity of the moment – painting.

The wild underpainting had dried on my 18X24 by 2 inch canvas.

I go to work. At one o’clock this afternoon the power comes on again and I am ready to take a break and share the progress with you.

There is more to do but it is a good start.

Sprout Question: What is your creative activity of choice when the power goes out?

Note: My apologies for being late with today’s post but you will have to take it up with the wind and the arbutus tree… they have let me know they are taking full responsibility for the delay.

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

Evening Sea Oil Painting

/ Terrill Welch / 40 Comments

The sea hag swished her skirts then drapes them elegantly over dark rocks. Embracing the shore she pauses – then glides away, only to return again. Ah what a temptress. With the last light of a sunset sky caught in her folds, she lays the sea before us.

“Evening Sea” is painted on 100% natural cotton, 11X14 inches by one and a half inches.

View full resolution image here. (much more detail)

I do not have any process shots of “Evening Sea” beyond the initial underpainting that I shared earlier. It is one of those times that I settled in and painted until I was done and then fussed a bit around the edges the next day. This doesn’t happen often when painting but it did this time. I still look and see something that I might want to change but the roll of the sea is caught in the patterns of reflection and the movement is trapped in the paint showing through from underneath. So I don’t touch it. I leave it and watch the sea in its evening beauty.

Sprout Question: Can you tell us about a piece you created with ease?

Note: If anyone has any tips for photographing oil paintings, I am all ears (or eyes). They are much more difficult to get “true” then my watercolour paintings and I’m struggling a little with it – okay I’m struggling a lot (it took about 20 shots to get this the way I wanted it) but a person has to start someplace.

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

The Question of Who

/ Terrill Welch / 24 Comments

The sea snatches at sandstone mounds as gulls plead their case with the winds – which am I, sea, sandstone, gull or wind?

View and purchase full resolution image here.

Early morning – Flexible and Flowing… one of 64 cards drawn for today.

I can say more but this feels just right.

Sprout Question: Does the question of who come up in your creativity?

Have a wonderful weekend.

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

Practice of a little each day

/ Terrill Welch / 14 Comments


I express my creativity in various forms. The main three expressions are photography, painting and writing. Monday through Friday I provide a blog post on Creative Potager with a sprout question designed to help us take our creativity further.  I have been noticing a thread or theme coming up in both my life and in our sprout responses. The thread is like a strawberry plant sending runners out in all direction seeking fertile soil. Since I like strawberries and I like sprout responses on Creative Potager, I thought I would provide some rich ground to expand on what I call “the practice of a little each day.”

This practice has been part of my life for a very long time and harkens back to the work of  William Glasser, and choice theory and reality therapy (which I took both the basic and intensive training in the 1980’s). Today this work also seems to have sprouted up as part of coaching and brief therapy but its roots are also identifiable yoga, mediation and other eastern practices. Now that, for recognition and reference, I have identified my personal lineage to the practice let’s get on with fertilizing these Creative Potager creative runners with “the practice of a little each day.”

View and purchase full resolution image here.

What is “the practice of a little each day?”

1. Each morning listen deeply to what your creative need is for that day (different from your wants or desires needs are like the basic needs of the air and water for our creativity to survive).

2. Make a commitment and a concrete specific plan to action you are going to take to fulfill that need just little before the end of the day. No excuses, no judging. Gently and firmly ask yourself these questions “Is what I am committing doable? Is what I am doing now working for me? If yes, how can I keep doing it? If no, what will work better?”

The key to this practice is clarity about your long-term creative intention and doing “a little each day” which is something I call a living vision. In this case, a living vision for expressing your creativity.

View and purchase full resolution image here.

The practice is simple in design and takes a life time to appreciate – it is a practice. We can start again each day – or even each hour if need be. Please take from it what works for you and let go of the rest.

Sprout Question: How does “the practice of a little each day” inform your creativity?

Note: Today includes some of my more meditative images that support my own deep listening. The first one is currently the background on my laptop.

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

Oil Painting East Point Cliffs

/ Terrill Welch / 21 Comments

On February 26, 2010, I began putting a melon orange underpainting on an 18”X24” gallery quality 100% 2” thick canvas. Oh the spring the canvas, the smell of linseed – so familiar from more than 30 years ago. Yes it has been more than 30 years since I have painted with oils. And these are Grumbacher water miscible oils something completely new. The instruction I was given when I purchased them was – “just paint!”

I have been painting with water colour paints since I was twenty so I just smiled and thought “we shall see.”

A muddy lump of colour is the end result on February 28, 2010 but it felt good – and I needed new brushes. The ones from 30 years ago are toast. So I picked up new ones when we next went to the city. Much better.

March 1, 2010 the painting is starting to take shape and I am lost in sea, land and time.

Over the next couple of weeks I sit and paint several times until the painting starts to tighten up and become the most unruly “problem child.” Where was the painting I had originally given birth too?

I stayed with it – painting and feeling and painting some more. I may fuss a bit with presentation but I think this cooked.

View and purchase full resolution image here.


Sprout Question: What do you do when you have a creative “problem child?”

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

Cheating

/ Terrill Welch / 18 Comments

Bravely going off in another direction

Does it ever happen to you where you set an intention to do something only to find that you have done something else? That is what happened to me yesterday. I was all set to start writing up some story cards from the source material for Mona’s Work. As I turned around to pick up the material, I locked attention on my oil painting in progress.

(18″ X24″ 1.5″ canvas)

That was it. Next thing I know my creative energy was thrumming at a low hum and hours had disappeared as follows…

I paint the sandstone cliffs with their heavy underbelly colours. The sea rushes towards my brush – pushing and pulling. I witness the internal tension.

Exactness is not the same as expressing the exact emotion in your work.

I knew I needed the cadmium underpainting to hold the seascape together – I did not know it would also hold me together as I painted.

I remind my self to breathe through my nose as the sea air catches me – yet the only sound is the swish, swish, swish of my brush on the canvas. Stretched tight under my enthusiasm every now and again there is throng drum before the swish. Linseed oil seeps through where there had been the smell of the salt from the sea.

I haven’t forgotten, I know the spring of the canvas, I know that sandstone needs a hint of crimson in its tan mix, I know – yes I know. Ohhhhh! I know nothing! What is this tangle paint scrapping it out on the canvas? Time to stop.

Will it make a painting? Yes, it already is a painting. Will it make a gallery painting? This is never my painterly question.

Swish, swish, swish – brush on canvas – a sound as soothing as the surf coming ashore.

Mona’s Work is pushed forward into tomorrow, March 2, 2010 (the painting will take a few days to get tacky enough to work on again anyway).

Sprout Question: Have you ever felt like you cheated on your creative intention?

Oil painting is very different from my usual medium of water colour painting. With water colours I go from light to my darkest colours at the very end. I still block in my composition with underpainting but I have to be able to “live with” what shows through. With oil painting, I start with a contrasting underpainting colour to block in the composition. Because of the strong divergence of colour that will be in this finished painting, I stayed with one range of colour in the underpainting. In both mediums, I build the painting up over a series of sittings. However, it has been over 30 years since I have painted with oils. My brain feels the stretch from working the colours from dark to light, as I had been taught by an Australian trained artist, Sheila Timmins, when I was about fourteen years old. The water miscible oils paints I’m using now are a little different but I’m not sure exactly how yet.

Bonus: Here is a photo of a finished oil painting “The Cow” by my sister Sue Wiebe whose work some of you had asked to see. Excellent control of shadow and light.

And here is a close up of Sue Wiebe’s “Water Lilies” that shows the layering of paint which allows the water to flatten on the canvas and the lily pads to float on top.

Thank you sis for sending me these images to share. Artist Sue Wiebe lives in Armstrong, British Columbia, Canada. With an undergraduate degree in English, she has also completed a year at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Every once in a long while she finds a free moment to sprout on Creative Potager.

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.

From Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada

My Art for Haiti

/ Terrill Welch / 10 Comments

As I am catching up, after two days of being off-line due to high winds, I drop in on Martha Marshall’s blog and discover her Art For Haiti post. I must participate. Below are the three images that I will donate 100% of post-production profits until the end of February 2010 to AVAAZ Stand with Haiti. I’m providing my redbubble link for each image for full resolution and purchase of various products including cards, matted and framed prints and canvases.

View “Sandstone Shoreline” (a new image) in full resolution and purchase here.



View “Last of the Season” watercolor image in full resolution and purchase here. More about publishing of “Last Rose” in River Poets Quarterly Journal here.


View full of resolution of “Stand with Haiti” image and purchase here. More about the rose-hip and Stand with Haiti image here.

If you are on twitter, you can help by tweeting “RT @terrillwelch  My Art for Haiti http://bit.ly/77EG0b #art4haiti ” in your update.

In closing, I offer a special thank you to Martha Marshall and her outstanding An Artist’s Journal Blog for this inspiration.

Sprout Question: How has your creativity been useful in contributing to the greater good of others?

© 2010 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.

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.