Tag Archives: Inspiration

Inspiration Monday: Colour

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colorful-paints-WallpaperThe fact that human beings can perceive colour has been a huge influence on our development and our cultures. Colour has helped to protect us from danger, and find good things to eat.  It has helped us to define who we are in relation to others, as well as what we believe.  These days, it is as widely used in marketing and medicine as it always has been in art and fashion.  Colour blindness can prove a significant disability.

Thinking about how we respond to colour can be a rich seam to plunder for creative purposes.  The artists of the Fauvist movement, such as Matisse, and later Abstract Expressionists such like Mark Rothko, used intense shades of colour to convey and provoke emotion.  Both Matisse and Picasso made blue nudes, but look at the images they produced:

blue-nude picasso

Picasso Blue Nude 1902

blue nude Matisse 1952

Matisse Blue Nude 1952

Matisse’s vibrant cutout provokes a very different response to Picasso’s sombre meditation on grief.

Blue is the perfect colour to think about as an example.  It is culturally significant in many ways.  For example, the pigment lapis lazuli, a vibrant blue, was the most expensive pigment available to Medieval and  Renaissance artists, so was reserved for only the most important figures. Thus, the Virgin Mary is always pictured wearing a blue robe.  In Medieval England, blue was worn as an amulet to ward off ill-health, probably because of its Marian associations.  (This is why brides still wear ‘something blue’.)  In contrast, in some cultures, blue is shunned as the token of death, ghosts and bad luck.

We identify blue with calm and peace, and blue light has been used in urban areas with some success to reduce violence.  Blue can also be associated with depression – we talk of ‘having the blues’.

Conversely, red is seen as a vivid, energetic colour, associated with lust and sex.  We speak of the ‘scarlet woman’ for example.  It can also be interpreted as a warning of danger, as in ‘Stop’ signs and traffic lights.  Rooms painted red look smaller to our perception, but also warmer and cosier.  A blue room looks airy and spacious, but can seem rather cold.

Our emotional response to colour is also of interest.  We speak of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours, and choose the clothes we wear by colour according to our mood.  I wear bright red all the time, but my mother accuses me of looking ‘too bright’ when I do!  My sister has such a visceral response to the colour lilac that it actually makes her nauseous.

I never really appreciated the importance of colour in the landscape around me until I moved to East Anglia.  I grew up on the south coast of England, by the sea.  There, the beaches are formed of toffee-coloured flints and broken, bleached shells.  The sea is often edged with emerald green seaweed, and is invariably the colour of cold coffee.  The crumbling sandy cliffs are the colour of ginger, and are held together by clumps of dark green gorse which turns acid yellow in spring.

The colours of the Norfolk coast are much more muted.  The beaches are pale sand, bound with dunes of khaki marram grass.  The sea is often indigo or petrol blue, and the skies are milky even in the most brilliant of summer weather.  Here, the prevailing colours are buff, dun, woad, grey.  They make the south coast seem gaudy by comparison.

As an artist or writer, you can use all this to your advantage.  The psychology and culture of colour can set the scenes for your images and stories.  Imagine a woman walking into a grey room in a scarlet dress?  (Artist Jack Vettriano uses this kind of contrast to huge effect!)  Imagine what people would be whispering behind her back.  Imagine what the response of the man she is meeting for dinner might be.

Creative Exercises:

Spend some time thinking about your own responses to colour.  What colours do you have in your home, and why?  Do they remind you of happy memories, or are they just there?

What are the colours you predominently wear?  How do you feel in them?  Go to the shops and try on garments in colours you would never normally wear.  How do they feel?  Why would you normally shy away from them?  What do you think the colours would say about you if you appeared in public in them?

Spend some time sitting on a bench in the high street, watching passers-by.  Note what colours they are wearing.  Are you drawn to them because of their colour choices, or repelled?  What do you think their colour choices say about them?  And what do you think they are trying to say with colour?

Keep your eyes peeled for colour around you.  What colour is your front door, the doctors’ waiting room, the toilet in your favourite restaurant, the plaster of the building across the road?  What shades are the trees, the earth, the sky?  What do these colours mean to you personally?  How do they make you feel?

You might like to spend some time with your writing notebook.  Choose a colour and write a word association exercise, scribbling all the words that come into your mind in connection with that colour, no matter how outlandish they might seem.  Now go back and examine what you have written.  Does your list suggest an atmosphere, a story, an image?  Play with whatever comes up as a response and see where it takes you.

There are a host of books you might like to read in connection with this subject.  Here are a few:

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier

The Colour by Rose Tremain

Colour: Travels through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay

Happy Colouring,

EF

Inspiration Monday: Heroes

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Iain Banks

Iain Banks

Life is what happens when you are making other plans.  Today I am once again deviating from my plan because something momentous happened yesterday.  The Scottish novelist, Iain Banks died, aged 59.  He was the author of ‘The Wasp Factory’, voted one of the Great Novels of the Twentieth Century, as well as ‘The Crow Road’, a book which begins with the immortal line:

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

Iain Banks, The Crow Road, Scribners 1992.

Surely, this is the greatest first line of any novel since Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and Orwell’s ‘1984’.

Regular readers will know that Banksie was a hero of mine.  I went to see him speak several times, as he was a regular visitor to Norwich, near where I live.  He was best described in three words, in my experience:

Angry.  Talented.  Funny.

He introduced me to a Scotland that I fell in love with, and to a way of writing that is spare, funny and insightful.  He was extraordinarily productive and his work covered a wide range of subjects, genres and styles.  When you opened a new Banksie novel, you never knew quite what you were going to get next.

If you want to read the best of Banks’s literary fiction, I recommend ‘The Wasp Factory’, ‘The Crow Road’, and ‘Complicity’.  I can’t comment on his science fiction, for which he was also justly famous, because I never managed to get through one.  Space operas aren’t really my thing.  But as I have said before,  his ‘Raw Spirit’, a book about whisky, driving, Scotland and being a writer, is one of the most charming I have read.

It is sad that a writer so talented and prolific has been taken from us so young, but why am I writing about this?  Because Banksie was a writing hero of mine, that’s why.  A writer I admired and wanted to emulate.  Like Virginia Woolf, his photograph hangs in my study to inspire me.  He taught me that protagonists don’t have to be likeable, and that little memories from growing up can serve as icons of our internal psychology.  He taught me that you should keep at it, and write what you love.  And that it’s okay to be funny, and a bit geeky.

Creative Exercise:

Who are the people that inspire you?  Whose work do you seek to emulate, or admire?  Whose biography have you read for a better understanding of the creative process?  Who are your artistic heroes?

These people are your creative ancestors, and you must always acknowledge where you come from.  Take time in your notebook to name the people who inspire you, whether it is their life struggle from which you take courage, as I do with Woolf and Frida Kahlo, or their creative process which fascinates you.  Perhaps it is their politics, or religious faith you admire, or their down-to-earth attitude.  Perhaps it is simply the creative work they produced.  Whether your hero is Steven Spielberg, Gandhi, Maya Angelou or Picasso, explore what they mean to you, what their example says about where you want to take your art.

Happy Creating,

EF

Inspiration Monday: Architecture

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Travel Pictures Ltd

Shark House, Oxford

The Inspiration Monday series is designed to give you a selection of places to look for inspiration for whatever art you create, from writing to quilting, from dance to pottery.  There are places and things to inspire you everywhere, no matter how blocked you feel!

Alright, I confess.  I’m a bit of an architecture nut.  I’m lucky.  I live in a country that is just bursting with fabulous buildings, from the modest to the outrageous.  So much has survived from our long past, and so much is being produced now that is thrilling and new.

Architecture provides a great inspiration, even if you are not into history, as I am.  It is especially useful as a starting point for the visual arts (how about making a quilt based on architectural motifs from your local area, especially if you live in a place that has an interesting and original vernacular architecture of its own.)

For a writer, architecture can be more than just set dressing.  Think of the magnificence of the stately home, Brideshead, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, ‘Brideshead Revisited’, a building whose ornate Catholic imagery permeates the relationships of all the characters.  Or perhaps the dark secrets represented by the rambling corridors of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, where the gothic corners hide secrets that threaten the happiness of the unnamed heroine.

Architecture is not just about the grand mansions of the rich and privileged.  The sqallid, shabby, utilitarian flats of Orwell’s ‘1984’ are just as terrifying as the monumental Ministry of Truth.  Or perhaps the rickety walkways and rookeries of Oliver Twist’s Victorian slum dwellers, or the eponymous ‘L-Shaped Room’ described by Lynne Reid Banks.

Peter Mothersole's House

Peter Mothersole’s House, Norwich

I’ve had a fascination with the building pictured above for some years now.  It’s eccentric and rather alarming pitch to one side only makes me love it more.  I’ve made it the home of one of the characters in my new novel.  In fact, it would not be so far fetched to say that this house has inspired the entire novel.

Compare the pictures below, and consider the kinds of stories that might happen in each, architecturally different, setting:

Speedies

Speedy’s, well known to all ‘Sherlock’ fans.

Greek villa

Greek Holiday Villa, Lesvos

terrace houses

Terraced Houses, Northern UK

awesome-modern-house-mediterranean-coast-1

Modernist Mediterranean house

Architecture can be the starting point for your art and writing.  It can be set dressing, atmosphere, even a character in its own right.  Using architecture as a starting point can ground your work in it’s local context, add weight to the story, place it in a particular time, economic class, religious mode or social millieu.  You can say a great deal about your characters through the kinds of houses they live in, the buildings where they work and worship, and why they choose these and not others.

Writing Exercise:  Look Up

Porch heraldry, Blickling Hall, Norfolk (NT)Porch heraldry, Blickling Hall, Norfolk (NT)

Next time you are walking around town, look up above the shop fronts.  You usually spend your time looking into the plate glass windows at all those gorgeous things you can’t afford.  You may not notice the kinds of buildings they are housed in.

In Britain and across Europe, you may see fascinating architectural details that you never noticed before, even in a street you have walked up all your life.  In other countries, you may see less history, and more the story of the way the architecture is used by it’s inhabitants, the way they have added to it, moulded it to their own needs over time.  What kind of lives are lived out behind these walls?  What stories have these beams and doorframes witnessed?

You might like to learn to read a building, to spend some time researching architecture in your area, the little quirks that are local.  In most countries you will find builders have used the materials that come to hand: wooden logs, local stone, thatch, reeds, brick of different colours, pantiles. What is local to your area?  What is the local style? What shapes do the buildings make – are they low, huddling to the ground against the weather, or do they tower above the streets, dwarfing the inhabitants, statements of power and wealth?  Can you incorporate this into your art?  What does it say about the kinds of lives people live, and have lived, around you?

Happy Creating!

EF

Inspiration Monday: On Walking

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Footprints Ardnave 1Many great writers have also been great walkers.  Imagine Jane Austen striding across the Hampshire countryside around Chawton, her home village, the hem of her white muslin gown getting stained with mud, or Virginia Woolf stomping over the Sussex Downs, hands buried deep in her pockets, muttering sentences and paragraphs for her current work under her hat brim.  The Romantic poets were famous for striding around the Lake District, soaking up the epic scenery and composing all the while.

There is something meditative about walking, a rhythm that comes with stomping feet, the steady repetition of step after step over the ground.  The act of walking induces a kind of trance, a change in consciousness that opens up our minds.  When I am able to walk, I can exorcize even the foulest of moods, and I always come home with an idea, an image, a sentence at the very least.

Walking gets us close to our environment in a way that travelling by other means can’t.  You cannot see details from a car the way you can on foot.  A cat lazing on a sunny windowsill.  The colour of a starling’s wing.  A family gathered around the kitchen table, enjoying a late sunday lunch together as you pass.  On foot, you can surreptitiously peer in through windows, or linger to observe a view, a cloud or a flower.  We can even listen in to conversations we might miss otherwise:

‘Andrew, did you put the blood and bone tub back in the shed last week, because I can’t find it?’

Walking allows us to observe the world whilst being part of it.  It brings us into Flow, a place where our thoughts smoothe into a creative stream.  We can walk ourselves out of being stuck on a project, and we can walk ourselves into a new one.  Plus, it burns calories and keeps you fit and, well, and who doesn’t love that?

Creative Exercise:

Put a notebook or sketchbook and a pencil in the pocket of your jacket.  You could even take a camera.  Put on a sturdy pair of shoes and go for a walk around your neighbourhood.  Take twenty minutes, more if you have it.  Try to walk with a steady motion, a regular rhythm.  Drum out a beat with your soles. Open your mind to whatever thoughts come up.

Look around you.  What little details, or big stories to you witness?  You can scribble things down on your way, or you can stop, if you have the time, to take notes, draw a sketch or two, snap a few photographs.  You don’t have to photograph people, remember –  a wonky chimney stack or a graffitied sign might spark your interest, perhaps even an interesting pattern made by litter in the gutter.  Take the time to witness and observe.  Combine this with the meditative beat of footsteps.  A treasure trove is outside your door.  Even if you only walk and see, do that much.  When you get home, note down what you have seen for use later, and enjoy feeling refreshed.

Walk twice a week for preference, daily if you can.  Get to know your locale.  Push yourself by walking in new places.  Extend and vary your routes.  Walk whether you feel like it or not.  Especially when not.  Putting one foot in front of another gets your mind to a new place that is always worth exploring.

Inspiration Monday: Weather

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I live in the UK.  We have lots of weather here.  Bucketloads of it!  It comes from having a maritime climate, caught between the cold North Sea and the Atlantic Gulf stream.  It characterizes our nation and our culture.  We are famous for it.

Since I came to live here in Norfolk, I’ve been fascinated by clouds.  Norfolk is famous for ‘Big Skies’.  It impossible to explain that until you have been here and seen the wide open spaces.  Norfolk is not as flat as everyone seems to think – Noel Coward has a lot to answer for, in my opinion – but what it does have is open vistas and large expanses of farm land reclaimed from sea.  The result is fantastic cloudscapes every day.  It colours the way people here live, and the way they view their lives. (If you are interested in how the landscape affects the people here, I can’t recommend highly enough the novel Salt by Jeremy Page.)

Weather gives atmosphere to writing and painting, as well as to life itself.  Just look at this image by painter John Aitkinson Grimshaw, who specialised in moonlit landscapes.

Boar-Lane-Leeds-1881This one shows a wet day, and the slick cobbles and leaden sky are so evocative.  What secret stories might be happening on those wet pavements, or behind those glowing shop windows?

Compare these two images of the same building, the National Trust’s property at Ickworth in Suffolk.

Ickworth sunny Ickworth weather

Granted, the angle is slightly different, but look at the sky – one with glowering cloud, the other with sunshine.  The atmosphere is significantly different in each, a sense of forboding in the right-hand image that simply isn’t there on the left.

You can use weather to prompt your creative work, as Grimshaw did, or you can use it to enhance it.  You can see this is the paintings of John Constable, and the writings of Emily Bronte.

Writing Exercise:

Andrew Cowan, in his brilliant book on Creative Writing, suggests keeping a notebook solely on the weather, noting adjectives and descriptions every day for a year in order to inform your stories.  It is hard to write credibly about a snowy day in a heatwave, for example, or vice versa, so a record of what weather feels, looks and smells like can be incredibly useful!

You might not want to go quite as far as recording the weather every day for a year, but try a writing exercise where you look out of the window – or even better, go outside and experience the weather first hand.  What is the temperature like?  Are there clouds, and if so, what kind?  Is the air moist, crisp, cold, humid?  What does it smell like?  Are there ice crystals on the vegitation, or are the flowers in full and sumptuous bloom?

Record what you see, and then go a step further.  How does this weather make you feel?  What kind of events and interractions might happen on a day like this?  Is it a foggy day for furtive meetings, a dark, moonless night for dastardly deeds, or a hot and sultry afternoon suggestive of languid adultery?

You could use weather to enhance the atmosphere of a scene, or you could contrast it to add clarity to the action.  Imagine a meeting of high ranking spies in a sweltering noon, brows beaded with sweat and shirts stained dark under the arms, whilst all the time, the great business of state is being negotiated.  Spend some time in your notebook playing with weather.  Try out a scene in one kind of weather, then set it in the opposite.  What kinds of problems and interesting ideas does this raise?

Happy Creating!