The Creative Identity

Stationery Porn – Part Three

I didn't quite expect the third part of my forays into stationery to turn up so soon right here, but following part one and two, I received quite a few emails suggesting I take a look at some other mouth-watering places. So here it goes... *** Curly Girl Design is the site for quirky and sassy stationery, from journals to notecards, calendars and paper napkins. It's very much for girls this one and I love it all. Zetta Florence is an Australian site that is big on Cavallini (always a plus point) and on 'Australia in Print'. I love birds and stationery with birds is where it's at for me. Uguisu is a Japanese site that sells original Japanese masking tapes, notebooks, stickers, rubber stamps and so on. The stamps are just to-die-for but, of course, the masking tapes are the ones that make us squeal the most these days... Finally, Puro Papel is just shock-inducing, as far as I am concerned. Bright and beautiful I just cannot imagine how great these papers must smell. Mega-drool. I know I said that ink and pen porn should really be a separate thing, but I cannot resist the Windsor and Newton inks, which come in fantastic little bottles in fantastic little boxes, and I am going to tell you right now. I use these for drawing and sketching (I cannot abide pencils, although I like to smell them), or simply to ogle them. And if you're ready for Art Porn, head over... Read more →

Try This

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. –Oscar Wilde– I don't remember skies as starry as the ones I used to observe as a child. We used to live in a semi-rural location that enjoyed a lot of good, dry weather in the summer, so it is now obvious that this was the reason one could see millions of stars while people in big cities never get a moment of true darkness. Have you ever wondered why the Great Bear doesn't quite look like a bear at all? And does Orion's belt look like one of the belts you've got in your wardrobe? Probably not. I always felt that finding pictures in a starry sky was not unlike looking at the clouds and seeing faces, things, animals in them. We've already been cloud-bathing, now let's try star-gazing... Get a pic of a starry sky and connect the dots so that you've got a couple of shapes. Write a story explaining why you've got that image in the sky or even an autobiographical note that explains why you see it. Read more →

Writers On Artists – Part Two

On Monday I told you about the foreword to the excellent Writers On Artists. Today I am here to give you a little more information about this anthology and to share some of it. Karen Wright says in the introduction that this book has been in the making for fourteen years (it was published in 2001), and that after much agonising over who should go in first, she was advised by the late David Sylvester to place them chronologically in order of publication. Thus we have thirty-nine writers on thirty-nine artists, from Peter Fuller on Sydney Nolan to Jed Perl on Henri Matisse, from Andrew Motion on Duane Hanson to A.S. Byatt on Patrick Heron, Siri Hustvedt on Giorgio Morandi and Seamus Heaney on Barrie Cooke. Here are some of my favourite extracts which, I really do hope, will spur you on to track this book down in order to enjoy, and maybe even discover, both writers and artists. * The subject of all Cézanne's paintings is space. And those solids which, by their presence, delimit and define space between and surrounding them all – whether landscape or still-life objects – are not more solid, not more tangible than these shaped aerial spaces which separate them. The spaces between the solids in Cézanne's paintings are themselves solid! And these spaces between things are as solid and as individually shaped as those things themselves. Patrick Heron on Paul Cézanne The Blue Vase * I think a lot of people in England... Read more →

Writers On Artists – Part One

I began my online writing journey in 2003, when I set up a weekly chat with a few writers I had met in a forum. One week I proposed we all wrote as a blind person without ever telling the reader the narrator couldn't see. This was one heck of a difficult exercise. Some of us attempted it, others didn't even go as far; the simple idea that we were to describe the invisible and the visible through the eyes of someone who had never seen gave us brain freeze. I was therefore thrilled when I opened a book that has been knocking about my bedroom for months, and found that its foreword, by A.S. Byatt, talks about words' inadequateness when describing visual art. Come back on Wednesday for some of my favourite extracts from Writers On Artists, a fabulous anthology, whether you are a writer, a painter, both or neither. *** Writing about painting is peculiarly difficult. As Patrick Heron says "the flavour of words is intensely anti-visual. Strictly speaking, painting cannot be written about. Visual experience is purely visual..." A good novelist or poet, describing a place or person, knows that the words call up as may different mental images of that place or person as there are readers. Yet to write about painting requires unusual rigor and accuracy. A work of art is singular. There are many ways of writing badly about painting. Most painters write badly, producing manifestos or vague lyrical afflatus. There is an "appreciative"... Read more →

Try This

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none. –Jules Renard– When I did my undergraduate degree (English), I was first confronted with word counts. It wasn't until my first essay, a poetry compare-and-contrast, that I really understood what 2,500 words felt like. And that was hell. It's odd to think this way now, as I normally write that much during the course of a normal day (of a normal good day, I should say), but in the beginning, I used to dread it. Now things have changed immensely for me, so much so that thinking of writing a short story only 350 words long, such as the one that won this year's Bristol Prize, makes me feel queasy. I know I would give up without even attempting it. Can you deal with this amount of pressure? Can you write short, short fiction? Write a 50-word short story featuring a writer who struggles to write. Read more →