writing

An interview with Terrill Welch by Charles van Heck

/ Terrill Welch / 4 Comments

Every once in a long while someone reaches out and gently grasps your elbow to steer you over to a quiet spot where they can ask evocative questions. Such has been my experience in being interviewed by writer Charles van Heck! When someone is really listening in a deep and meaningful way I often have lots to say – so this in not a short read. However, I hope you will find it an interesting one. Enjoy!

Impression and Perspectives from Mayne Island
An Interview with Terrill Welch

at Whitman Pond Charles van Heck – Woodhull Arts Journal

Whitman Pond is the website of poet and author, Charles van Heck. Welcome to Whitman Pond, a fictional place that has had a long gestation.

I know that for those of you that regularly visit here you will enjoy discovering Charles van Heck’s website and his writings and interviews.

SPROUT: Who recently asked you such good questions that you didn’t realize until afterwards how much you had to say?

 

© 2012 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

Terrill Welch online Gallery at http://terrillwelchartist.com

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Impermanence

/ Terrill Welch / 22 Comments

I share with you these pears dancing in the light of the sun coming through the window. But they are no longer there. We ate them. They were delicious. The photograph is history like all photographs has captured history.

(image may be viewed and purchased here)

Impermanence is difficult concept to viscerally accept. My limited understanding comes from Buddhist practices but it is an idea that has fascinated me since I was a small child and realized that turning of the earth gave me a glimpse of visually watching the passage of time. In fact, it is fair to say that expression of impermanence is a strong underpinning in most of my paintings and much of my reflective writing.  The Buddhist notion of impermanence is that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is in a constant state of flux. Here a section on the subject from wikipedia:

According to the impermanence doctrine, human life embodies this flux in the aging process, the cycle of birth and rebirth (samsara), and in any experience of loss. This is applicable to all beings and their environs including devas (mortal gods). The Buddha taught that because conditioned phenomena are impermanent, attachment to them becomes the cause for future suffering (dukkha).

Conditioned phenomena can also be referred to as compounded, constructed, or fabricated. This is in contrast to the unconditioned, uncompounded and unfabricated nirvana, the reality that knows no change, decay or death.

Impermanence is intimately associated with the doctrine of anatta, according to which things have no fixed nature, essence, or self.

Though I do meditate and go to the odd meditation retreat, I am not a practicing Buddhist. But there are times when I find that the Buddhist doctrine resonates and helps me to live a better life – with less suffering. Such a time is when the hard drive of my computer crashes beyond recovery. Some things were lost. Some things have been found in other places. I wasn’t and I am not particularly worried or grieving about any of these things.

What did strike me in a new way was the concept of impermanence. It was like I had been accumulating this understanding for years and all of a sudden I had a glimpse of it – just for a few days and even then only for a few hours at a time. I was able to experience impermanence beyond what my brain had constructed … it was tangible in the cells of my body, the earthquakes in Japan, David’s stroke, the birth of my grandchildren, the lines on the backs of my hand, and the daffodils in the woods.

(image may be viewed and purchased here)


This wasn’t a sense of peace and ease I was experiencing – I was terrified. My experience of the world, through my five senses, was no more permanent than the passing light between the trees. I was borrowing these experiences and stretching their presence through memory, writing, painting and collecting data on my hard drive. My thoughts go to Atlantis, the Egyptian pyramids, the ancient Greek poet Sappho – all passing moments in time with just a few fragments left visible through story, crumbling earth and fragments of poetry.  I grasp that my existence, my being, and my experiences are all expressions of impermanence. For a few moments, okay hours, it was hard not to hyperventilate and go screaming naked through the woods.

But after awhile I concluded, nothing had changed. These things were the same before I looked them squarely in the eye. My knowing did not chance impermanence – only my experience of impermanence.

(image may be viewed and purchased here)

This week I shall work on another painting. I shall do it with conscious awareness of my impermanence and its impermanence.

Sprout question: How does impermanence express itself in your creativity?

© 2011 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

Terrill Welch online Gallery at http://terrillwelchartist.com

Related Articles

Impression of an Artist

/ Terrill Welch / 24 Comments

Week after week I visit myself on the canvas of a painting, through the frame of an image or between the words of a paragraph. Do these impressions provide any further insight into my being and my interpretation of my world?

I like to think they do. I like to believe that these creative endeavors cast at least a shadow of truth on what I often think of as my core essence – that part of me that isn’t body or earth-bound in this life time. But is this really a possible truth?

As the paint is chosen, mixed and applied without thought, I like to believe there is a subconscious part of me that knows what it is doing. But maybe it is all accidental fragments of my conscious mind colliding with the paint, the canvas and the movement of my brush.

I am doing a study of blue – a series on the shades of blue. What I am discovering is that blue is more than a colour. Blue is a spiritual void for reflection… as I paint the sea… the shadows of the trees… or the sky. If I had known how wide this void would open up, would I have committed to the series?

Ah, no point in musing about what might have been.

This week I have one 10 X 12 inch cotton canvas underpainting ready for completion. In my imagination the heavy clouds press down with formidable force over the dark seas. May I be able to hold this moment long enough to reach in and pull out something that is the essence of me, of you and of the very world itself.

Sprout question: What impression best describes your creative self?

© 2011 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

A Fall Day on Mayne Island

/ Terrill Welch / 12 Comments

It occurred to us as we were eating lunch that it might be sinful not to take a long leisurely walk in the warmth of this most glorious fall day.

I am always fascinated by the ribbons of blues that stack up like exotic candy layers as I look out to the meeting of sea and sky. I drift and dream on the waves as the seagulls squawk and fish from the rocks.  Mount Baker is almost visible in the haze of the far shore – if you know it is there. I sense that it is time to move on.

I flatten body-to-earth on a sunny knoll next to the deep cool shadows of maple trees as they undress, dropping one crunchy brown leaf after another. We do not get much colour here on Mayne Island in the fall.

Mostly things turn brown and drift downward, sometimes holding themselves up as if to say “no, not yet! I’m not quite ready yet.” But the rains will come, silencing their whispers. These large brown leaves will be mulched into the earth to feed the first sprouts of spring.

Sprout Question: What are you letting go of to sprout new creativity?

Important: If you want gift cards, calendars, photographic prints before Christmas, October is the time to place your order at http://www.redbubble.com/people/terrillwelch. Original oil paintings can be purchased directly from me by sending an emailing to tawelch@shaw.ca .

© 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

Squishy hug of thanks WORDPRESS

/ Terrill Welch / 21 Comments

Thank you WORDPRESS for your user-friendly interchange and freely hosting blogs that can become small virtual communities such as Creative Potager has become. A big squishy, passionate hug is coming your way through cyberspace!

As of this hour today the wordpress Creative Potager blog has met a new milestone. Since its first post, on Dec 27 2009, the Creative Potager blog has published 102 posts and 1,605 comments AND (drum roll please) has had over 12,000 views. I am doing the happy dance (ta, ta, ta) all around the social networks with friends, casual acquaintances and passionate lurkers who are Creative Potager regulars.

Thank you especially to those who regularly respond to the Sprout Question that accompanies each post. Thank you to all of you who comment above and beyond the Sprout Question.  Thank you to all readers who lurk in the shadows. Your views are counted. You are part of the Creative Potager community.

My life and creativity is richer because of each and every one of you. Thank you, thank you thank you.

May the sun continue to rise, in all its glory, over our creative inspiration.

I decided we need a little visual toe-tapping to help us celebrate offered up by Andy the Daft Hermit from the Black Bus in the Highlands of Scotland. The music starts about 30 seconds in so wait for it and enjoy Andy’s photography video…

With much humble appreciation.

Terrill:)

Sprout Question: If WORDPRESS is the host and Creative Potager the post, who are you?

© 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

Uniquely Common Place

/ Terrill Welch / 19 Comments


View and purchase full resolution image here.

An image search in Google for “blue iris” brings up 4 million possibilities. Why would I bother taking a photo of a blue iris? Why would I bother to show it to you? Because this iris captures a moment near the end of a day by the lighthouse on Mayne Island. This iris reminds me of a moment that was filled with the beauty and wonder of the world as I grappled with the devastating BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I was feeling overwhelmed with hopelessness about the extent of this tragedy. I was angry at humanity for its greed and stupidity. Then I saw the blue iris. I stopped and drank it in, and as I did, all my fears melted down into the ground beneath my feet. I had this one moment with this blue iris, a moment that stilled my anger – a moment that allowed a sad sigh to be released and replaced with a soft smile as I traced the spiral curves of the intricate blue petals with my eyes.

When we think about how many sunsets have been painted or how many survival stories have been written or how many love songs have been sung, or how many photos have been taken of babies and old people we could ask – do we need any more? But we don’t or at least I don’t. I don’t because these common place moments are part of humanity’s mind, body and spirit motif. I can always look at an iris, baby or the weathered face of an elder with fresh eyes. I can always read about a hero having survived a war and a trip over the Himalayas with an open heart. I can always listen to a love song with new ears.

Yet when creating, we are encouraged to offer something new, something fresh… something that has never been done before. How can we do this when these engaging topics have been presented and consumed some 4 million times, like the blue iris above? I believe the answer lies not in the frequency of an old tale but in the precise uniqueness of its moment of telling. There are no two moments that are the same. Trust that if you are present to the creative moment you are in that is all that is required. You will see, feel, hear, smell and sense your subject in the uniqueness of that moment. Moments are temporary. Little lasts from one moment to the next for us to revisit. That is the nature of living. As creative beings we can create, capture, write and sing as if this is the only moment there is… because it is. There will be no other like it.

Now there are four million and one images of a blue iris in a Google search.

Sprout Question: What is your favourite work by another about a topic that is common place?

© 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

Searching for lost and soft edges

/ Terrill Welch / 33 Comments


When we see, we see around corners because of our rapid eye movements, our moving feet and bobbing head… and because we touch things.

Tuesday’s post “Seeing and Creating” talked about how the brain builds a visual field using rapid eye movement to create the image we are seeing. Some of the information that the brain uses to build an image comes from a history of spatial measurements that we have gathered through touch.

Seeing takes more than our eyes. We must learn spatial relationship, specifically our spatial relationship to other objects. We discover how to see where things are through practice using our hands and feet to touch and move around our world. Babies reach for our faces. Children will crawl, climb, run and jump with varying degrees of success as their brains and bodies learn to coordinate the distances of time and space. Our brain gathers and reuses these measurements in combination with information received from our eyes to provide context and relational information about what we are looking at. This complex relationship of gathering and building our visual field happens constantly and rapidly. Most often we are not even aware of the process.

However when we are creating it is helpful to understand and consider this information in our work. Some of our work in building a visual field will happen intuitively.  In fact, many situations a lot of our work in building a visual field will happen intuitively. We won’t know why we at first place a certain word in a particular sentence or why we paused the music on that particular note or why we made that particular mark off on the left side of the page or why we decided to include a particular boulder in our photograph. Mostly we just do what we do.

We can strengthen our work by increasing our conscious ability to build a visual field. A current practice of simplifying photographic images through noise reduction and sharpening and taking out what is not adding to the image is one way to play with how the visual field is built in the photograph.

Practices of adding, leaving or taking away in our creativity are not absolute creative positions but a tension we hold during the process of creating. It is in searching for lost and soft edges that I find I can most consciously building a visual field in my photography, painting and writing.

One tool or exercise we can use is to make marks or write words around your desired subject until it “appears” in your work. This helps us discover what clues or cues in the surrounding area are supporting our ability to see. In photography I do this by placing my desired object in various off-centre relationships in the frame. I change the height I take the image or the distance from the subject and so on.

Sprout Question: How do you know when less is no longer more?

Note: Here is a great reference I discovered as part of researching for today’s

The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies by Mark Paterson (2007)

Also here is an online article that is also helpful – Eyes and Hands: The relationship between touch and space http://people.exeter.ac.uk/mwdp201/space.html

A question I can not answer is how people without use of hands or ability to walk develop spatial relationships in building their visual field. Does anyone know the answer or have a resource?

© 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

A BLOGGER’S HAIKU

/ Terrill Welch / 30 Comments

A BLOGGER’S HAIKU

fragrance of lilacs

spring leaves, mauve buds, open, still closed

readers have waited

by Terrill Welch

I recently purchased haiku mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart (2008) by Patricia Donegan. The book is beautifully structured, presenting the poem and a piece of prose about her experience of the poem and a biographical paragraph about the haiku author. Donegan’s book and the lilacs I picked last night were my inspiration for today’s photograph and poem.

Sprout Question: When is your inspiration – just in time?

© 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 than Chocolate Covered Strawberries

/ Terrill Welch / 29 Comments

I have for you some chocolate covered strawberries.

View and purchase full resolution image here.

While you are making a choice on which one you will munch, before passing the plate along, let me show you the tulip I found in my garden yesterday.

View and purchase full resolution image here.

Between showers I grabbed my garden gloves.

Put on my hiking boots and began turning the sod.

While I was working the soil I thought about spring. I thought about summer and I thought about the business of creativity. You see, I have accepted a first right of refusal for the oil painting “East Point Cliffs.” My first participation in the BC Ferries showcase has netted a sale for a canvas print of “witness.” I have 100 beautiful cards ready in little envelopes for the farmers market this summer and more canvas photo prints arriving any day. Then there is the deciding of how many books to bring for the book reading of Leading Raspberry Jam Visions and Mona’s Work with Mayne Island writers at the Overleaf in Victoria Saturday April 24th. Plus, my solo art show “Sea, Land and Time” with the local Arts Council is confirmed for “September 2nd to 22nd. Is it any wonder I am turning over the business of creativity as methodically as each shovel of sod?

I am sure glad you enjoyed those strawberries.

Sprout Question: What does the business of your creativity taste like?

© 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

Randomness – a blogger’s truth

/ Terrill Welch / 10 Comments

Feeling an unbending resistance through every joint in my body I slowly wake. What time is it? Hum, just before 7:00 am. I did sleep in. The slate tiles are warm in the middle of our kitchen. Routine sees me through the making of stovetop coffee with a couple of homemade cookies that I promise to follow with fruit, yogurt and hemp seeds in awhile.

I’ve been randomly thinking about Kathy’s post “The Secret Lives of Bloggers” since she put it out on April 9th. I haven’t responded. I just keep thinking. I am thinking as I check to make sure the heat is on in the studio building as I am coaching this afternoon. I am thinking as I watch a beautiful Varied Thrush in the garden, and as I hear the rooster crow and the sheep asking for breakfast at the farm in the valley. I am still thinking as I curl into our very old Morrison chair and snag the travel section of Saturday’s Globe and Mail from the coffee table.

Bonny Reichert is telling me how to be “at home in Paris.”  I read about dark French coffee as I sip a medium roast, single origin, organic, fair trade, artisan, Ethiopia Sidamo Co-Op Shanta Golba, from our local Salt Spring Coffee (we take our coffee seriously on the west coast of Canada). At that moment it tastes very dark – and very French. My two cookies made with half whole wheat flour, half the sugar (all brown) and a quarter of the chocolate chips with an added cup of chopped walnuts and pecans transform into Laduree Bonaparter macaroons and elegant tiny cakes that I have ordered decisively (because sweets are serious business in Paris – and I had already heard this before reading Bonny Reichert’s article). I am no longer sitting quietly in our strawbale, timberframe home cradled by various shades of spring verte and grande fir trees. Saint-Germain is bustling. Raspail farmers market smells soak past my nose into my sensitive taste buds.

I wonder again about Kathy’s post and how much we need to know about each other to share an experience. In fact, how much do we really know about someone even if we live with them daily? How well do we really know ourselves? Take for instance Laurie’s recent “University of Life” posts. Attempting to know ourselves seems to me to be one of the greatest adventures of living…

So my dear friend and blogging colleague Kathy, at “Lake Superior Spirit,” what you share is just right and it is enough. I believe we only ever know fragments of others and a few more fragments about ourselves – even if it is our sole intention for each day we live. Yet those moments that slice our energy in pure connection to self, to another, or to a place; in this we know all we need to know. And Kathy, your blog does this with the expertise of a French chef choosing the day’s cuisine needs from local markets.

Sprout Question: How well do you know your creative self?

© 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