there are too few blogs around...

... and so I created two more.


1. Gesa Helms Art at http://gesahelms.blogspot.com

is just that... some of my art, for sale. Just in time for Christmas shopping I realised that I will be near all my prints, sketches and paintings, so I could put them up for sale. I've stuck with a fairly simple format - something which etsy to this date isn't. Blog posts link to flickr sets, currently of the plein air sketches and the monotypes with the offer of a paypal buy now button. There will be more additions.

Simple? I hope. Persuasive? I hope so too.

2. New blog number 2 is my learning blog at http://gesah-study.blogspot.com

Well, it's for learning - more specifically it is going to be my learning log for the OCA courses I am doing. As you may know, I've been printmaking 1 for a while and earlier this month I signed up to the drawing 1 course. The learning log for printmaking is mainly kept offline, which has proven more tedious and less enjoyable than I hoped. So - paint and pastel: study will try out learning as voyeuristic online experience. It's going to be a bit tedious - with specific assignments etc, so I decided to keep most of the OCA material away from this blog. It seems that I'm never really short of material to write about, so a separate blog for learning may work best.

Learning styles and preference

My kitchen window, this morning

... the post on learning styles is making me circle back to a post from two months back: Tell me, who is it you are?

Part of that was my own circle (complex systems and connections), but it got reinforced by fellow Watermarker Katherine's response and further exploration of her own learning style and what the blog has contributed to that.

It's making me smile how our particular styles shape how and what we write. - Well, that's my response and reaction to her brilliantly reflexive and analytical post on learning by blogging. She starts explicitly: This is about an exploration who I am, a sensemaking of what interests me. And she continues with the role and development of writing.

Writing is something that she used to do professionally and I still do professionally, and when reading her post I thought along about the rules I did and did not impose on my little blogging adventure. There are some clear rules, the clearest is that most people, bar immediate family, who do not blog themselves have only initials. - Leading to funny confusions of whether M is one or indeed several friends (well: currently M stands for three). There is another one for writing: be narrative and associative. Write the way that usually gets you into trouble for your academic publishing adventures.

Thus: the blog, from fairly early on, and now more and more deliberately has been set up as an other, a space that can, is, moves and develops. I am convinced that the blog benefitted from it; while joking at times that my academic writing gets even more like a brainstorming session and thus is even more likely not to fit, I am also certain that my academic writing does benefit from the blogging.

But - and this is now the topic of this post (long lead in, I know): I have most definitely benefitted from that rule which really is about establishing a frame for emergence*.

And that leads me back to my initial comparison of Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) being comparable to horoscopes: I'm cancer, so I'm crabbit, I bite, I like moving sideways rather than forward and really, while being all tough, I am very soft if I decide to open my shell - oh, and frequently I do loose my shell, shed my skin and become something else. Well - that's it, isn't it? Simple and it goes for 1/12 of the world's population.

I did find out who sent me the login for the MBTI test - it was part of my research management training course I was about to embark a few weeks later. The course took up a fair bit of time and strongly focussed on personality preferences, team management and career development of yourself and your team.

There were two initial discoveries about the type indicator:

1. I can confuse quite convincingly - the test involves a set of opposite preference pairs:

• (a) how you gain your energy - from the outside or inside (Extrovert or Introvert)
• (b) how you gather information - by Sensing or by iNtuiting
• (c) how you make judgements - by Thinking or by Feeling; and lastly
• (d) your lifestyle preference - by planning or by being open (Judging or Perceiving)

Well - and I can fairly convincingly pull off an extrovert, a rational thinker and a no decisionmaker. The one I really struggle with is collecting information in a factual, step-by-step mannner rather than starting with the whole. So, I can come across as the idealtype academic - INTJ; possibly also an ENFJ and an INFP.

But - and that is what got me:

2. my preference combination - while pretty rare - offers about 5-8 insights into who I perceive myself to be that I think only I and some close friends know. How on earth did Myers-Briggs know that I love paradoxes? That my desk is generally pretty messy but there's all the connections everywhere? That I know stuff about people often long before they know it themselves? And that I will usually withdraw from situations and people without ever saying much?

There are two more points for this - the implications for group dynamics and for learning and development - that's next. And there's another one, which connects to this as well as to so many other things: it's about the construction of real and imagined readerships - and our positioning towards, alongside or against those we do not know.

* well - take the principles of the Social and Organisational Learning as Action Research group at the University of the West of England, Bristol, for such frame.

Blogs and learning styles

... well: this is really going to be: MY blog and MY learning style, but: nothing wrong with a bit of generalisation, I suppose.

Jeanette had a useful review of her 1000+ blog entries and her summary of what the blog has enabled her to do made a lot of sense when I was looking back to two years of writing blog posts.

The last June weekend I was again in Bath, at the School of Management of the University of Bath for the third workshop on facilitation - Facilitation in complex adaptive systems was the title of a truly fantastic weekend. While I went through the material from the first course and the second (which I missed) I came across a questionnaire on learning styles - and the role of learning styles for facilitation.

This had come up at many points over the past few months and my various training, tutoring and other workshoppy things I have begun to fill my life with. Generally curious rather than not, I will look favourably at many survey topics and have a go at filling them in.

While preparing this post, I found this website which employs a similar frame of Kolb's and Honey & Mumford's learning cycles and styles to the one we used for the workshop. Have a look at this site and a questionnaire (should you care).

There are two clear preferences for how I like to learn:

1. strongest: by doing,
2. moderately: by reflection

I am pretty indifferent to pragmatism (unsurprising) and to theory (somewhat surprising given my love for anything heavy and conceptual ranging from state theory to poststructuralist feminism*).

My mother tends to designate my (1) preference as: you never listen; my friends tend to say about my (2) preference: you overanalyse.

And you know what?

The blog is perfect for both: it's about writing (reflection) about the stuff I've done - the stuff that worked well, the stuff that worked less well and the stuff that was a plain disaster. And, while we're on the writing: you can write about the writing and the thinking too (ditto). - It's fairly quick, can be haphazard, frequently half-baked, but will leave some sort of record, a place to go back to - which I frequently do and to move on (if not forward) with.

Thus, blogging for me is frequently 'trying out' - how does that look, sound, feel. There is a plan, - as general direction 'towards' or sometimes only 'away from'. But specificities of such direction don't exist, are to be filled in, developed, formulated or abandoned while walking, jumping or backtracking. That doesn't mean that it is spontaneous in content. Frequently stuff I write about has had time to prove in a warm cupboard for a year or so. But posting it, moves it on - it gives it shape, form, a name.

Yesterday's post on fields, commons and enclosures helped with some associations. Once it looked back at me it shouted technology and computer language at me... fields... commons... enclosures - not in the landscape but on the web. Interesting... let's associate more freely for a bit more. - Ha, and that's been one of the insights of doing all these courses on learning styles, project management and team management: to recognise what one can do well, prefers; to find ways of keeping working on such strengths; and to get one or several workarounds for the stuff that's in the blind spot: for me, that's clearly detail and a pragmatic approach.

But maybe the blog can work for those, too?

...oh, and I do like images, too. So, apologies for still being so stingey on images
... somehow the visuals are absent at the moment,
but I hope they'll resume soon...

*well, possibly not: it keeps me intrigued, feeds my imagination and my love for concepts, connections and possibilities - but it's not how I like to learn.

Love and loss in 0s and 1s

Elqui Valle 1, WIP, Detail
Oil on canvas, 80x70cm

One of my favourite blogs disappeared. It disappeared after infrequent posting over the past few months and then just a simple Goodbye message flickered up on my sidebar. Neda's Papiers Collés was a true find when I stumbled upon in over a year ago. Her collages get to the bits of personmaking that I admire greatly but don't have a clue of what to do with it just yet - I also simply lack the guts of putting that stuff into art. They opened up a view onto collage as medium and emotions as subject matter which thrilled me. Now, they are gone and the website is vacant.

But: the feed is still circulating - don't know how and why - but you should be able to find it with a feedreader. [http://www.papierscolles.com/feeds/posts/default]

Hm... thinking about it... it's ghosting now... resonating around cyberspace. How long, I wonder?

It's this strange business of doing stuff with people over a distance. And how to maintain, develop, move on and let go. Quite a few of blogs I discovered early on have disappeared by now. When it happened to the first one, I sent a concerned email after a while and the reply I got made me feel that I overstepped the mark of interaction amongst strangers. So, I won't send Neda an email; but I do wish her all the best and hope that's it's for good reasons that her blog is gone. Thanks for all those beautiful collages!

And, while I was away, both Casey and Jala made a wee pass at my blog - thank you, you two. It's thoroughly appreciated, even if I have been so slow in acknowledging it. Let's see where I can pass it on to.

... now that I've introduced ghosts, I will sit down and write up some of my persistent thoughts on this, this may take a while... - M., I think you may know what may be coming next...

Rewind 3 – Blogging

At post #202 I firmly refused to comment on what was before and what Gesah’s Paint & Pastel was about, but now I’m another 50 odd posts further on and don’t feel quite so speechless. 18 months ago, Torben, my brother, and I had been talking about a website… part publicity, part ‘Gesa wants to learn the internet’ project; while that was proceeding (i.e. T. was writing the script and I was editing images), I rather spontaneously thought ‘oh, why not a blog? I can do what others do’ and within minutes it was set up. I was intrigued by its immediacy, its flexibility; I also figured that – unlike a website – it would actually act as a prompt to myself to write (think, reflect) about all this art stuff I had been doing… part structured journal, part exercise book.

Before, I had posted a few of my paintings and sketches at WetCanvas and got to appreciate the interaction and feedback that was lurking beyond my keyboard.

Corn in Late summer, Detail
Pastel on board, 50x35cm

And, looking back, I am amazed and fascinated by the extent to which the blog has been serving these two purposes to (a) get me to do more art; and (b) provide source book, journal and planning tool.

Over and above, it serves a social function along a number of axes, both online and offline. There are first and most obvious other artists who blog. Their blogs, their posts and their comments have become a source that I don’t want to miss. And while I am in parts at points mildly amused by the idiosyncracies of online communities amongst strangers, particular quirks and eccentricities, I am also fascinated by the ways in which interaction is organised at a distance.

Apart from individual bloggers, there have been most notably the Moley Exchange project which Steph asked me to get involved in May; and more recently the Watermarks group, kickstarted by Vivien, Lindsay and Katherine. In particularly with the latter I am thrilled by the focussed discussions on the group blog and a private ning networking site that are taking place and which even over the short space of less than two months have helped me articulate and develop a whole number of points around seascapes, distance and abstraction.

And then there are friends and family who read the blog; many of them do not post comments but it is nonetheless the source of rather frequent conversation; I do like the nicks my brother invents to comment once in a while with a link to a whacky website; and just on the weekend my mum ticked off her ‘have to learn to leave comment in Gesa’s blog’ item, which made me smile. I am hopeful too that she will make a go of reading the posts where I am sure she will understand far more than she thinks she would. She had picked one of my two cornfields from summer for her Christmas present (see post here), and the other one is now for sale on Etsy, here.

Corn in late summer,
Pastel on board, 50x35cm

So, over time, the stuff about which I will consider blogging has widened. Whereas initially it was rather narrowly focussed on my practical painting and sketching, it soon begun to include notes from exhibitions, about artists I like – most notably the series on Joan Eardley from last winter, and more recently Cy Twombly; and while I still don’t have a tag on ‘culture politics’, I do have now tags on ‘thinkings’, ‘researching creativity’ and ‘working in the arts’ – all of which are moving my academic and research work closer to the stuff I paint and art about.

It also means – related to yesterday’s post on writing – that some of the posts are becoming less explanatory – just recently Jafabrit had written about her blog as a piece of art itself [sorry, it took me a while to find, it was in the comments on Casey's intro to the Fine Art Department, a rather neat small online art showcase adventure, see link here]; and after reading that, I’ve begun to feel more confident about not explaining my posts; about posting notes for others (in past or present); and of not minding if stuff isn’t immediately communicated to all who read it.

So, with all this having gone on over an extended length of time, I am struck by the attachment I have formed to my blog and all it encompasses. It has become important; I use it as source of reference, as ‘I want to listen to that song again’, ‘Oh, let’s check if that painting was included’ or ‘how did that poem go again?’. Quite similar to a painting, it has taken on quite a dynamic, a process, by itself, sometimes it surprises me, or angers me, but mostly it makes me rather happy.

Yet, there are couple of consequences of this: I tend to spend even far more time online than I used to; and with a day job that is rather computer/inet intensive, it is a development I am not too keen on. It also can be rather demanding of my attention and immediate response: ‘Oh, I cannot not answer within 3 hours.’ – That’s something I don’t like, there’s enough stuff I get stressed about, and this isn’t supposed to be one.

Lastly, I noticed that I started to ‘think in blog’. My mind formulates blog posts – 90% of these never see the light of day, and that’s all for the better, but nonetheless it is a rather specific way of expressing and formulating a day, an experience, a thought. And with this thinking in blog, I then begin to wonder what else is there outwith. But that may be the content of another blog post… or rather not? See what I mean? ...

Ok… that’s the scene set for rewind #4: finally, the art I did in 2008. Next post.

Post sharing

I've been playing about with my sidebar for some time now. It's part of some attempts to organise the blog less chronologically but more circular, linking back and forward. Part of that has to do with what I want this blog to be about/for. And, that often in practice means how do I want to use my blog. Well... if

"This journal provides a prompt and forum for reflections, ideas and experiments on paint and pastels and more."

- as taken from my intro, then let's make that prompt and forum more easily reflexive, if that makes sense.

There'll be something more extensive on this as part of a 'what I learned in the last year' kind of rambling, but for the meantime, I had been looking at

• a way to assemble my music videos so that I (and others???) can play them again.
• a library section
• something on my favourite posts
• a link to other posts elsewhere that I like

It has also, in practice, served as my blog reader. In particular the updated list of other blogs is a better way than me checking manually. Early on I had tried a couple of blogreaders, ended up with the live bookmarks in firefox eventually but found them tedious as they linked just to individual posts rather than the blog. When my google reader count was going awry throughout the week, I had a closer look at it, subscribed to myself and others and discovered the sharing function.

So, now I google feed read for the time being and have some things to share:

Watermarks

No more waiting on the sea....

Here's a splash... throw some stones across a still lake, watch some leaves float along a stream, wade in the sea at low tide or get soaked in a rainshower (wait: no, definitely too cold for that in December).

Seascape in Earth, 70x50cm
Soft pastel on board

Water does so many things...

So, we thought we'd do something with our fascination, curiosity and interest in the marks that water makes.

Watermarks is our new joint project, bringing together 9 artists from across the UK, France and North America. Vivien, Lindsay and Katherine have got this idea going and I am very excited about being part of it.

Do you want to see what we are doing? Start here to look, comment, follow etc:

http://watermarks-art.blogspot.com/

Paying it forward

Water spray and a low sun, Detail
Mixed media collage on paper

One of my friends had started the year by pinning up a note above her desk - written on it were three words: Neugier, Großzügigkeit, und Gelassenheit - curiosity, generosity, and something where translation doesn't work that well: my online dictionary tells me that Gelassenheit is calmness or composure - but that it too calm and composed - I think it requires a good portion of laidbackness in with it.

I'm usually hesitant when it comes to virtue. - My friends and colleagues will laugh: seeing that my main work project is about civility (and it doesn't get more problematically virtuous than that).

But never mind, Irene's collection of goods things to remember is the opening to my contribution to a bit of random generosity. Over the past few weeks (which have been those were I didn't really look much at other people's blogs because there were too many other things to do), a long and winded paying it forward trail made it through many artists' blogs.

The idea behind it is that you give something away on the basis of the recipients promising to do something for the next round of people... paying it forward and passing it on. It is up there with those projects where books are left on park benches or small pieces of art distributed across places for people to find and enjoy.

When trailing the current PIF, I am now looking forward to received a piece of art from Lindsay at Non-linear arts who's been doing a whole series of water-themes landscape explorations in oil pastel and acrylics, exploring abstraction and composition within these. She has also a number of really sponteneous and fresh water colour sketches.

The rules for the PIF are something along the lines that the first three to leave a comment on this post will receive something on the basis that they will reciprocate the same on their blogs with their artwork.

Yet - Tina Mammoser had a nice addition to this, and I think that rules are usually there to be changed: she stated explicitly that the PIF would also work if you (a) didn't have artwork to pass on or (b) didn't have a blog to do so.

So, here's my attempt to get my non-blogging but reading friends to leave comments: The first six to leave a comment on this post will receive some original work from me in the post - and it doesn't matter if you have a blog to pass the PIF on, but pass it on anyway and in other ways.

Thinking back about the three terms at the beginning - generosity, laidback calmness and curiosity - I reckon that the curiosity was indeed my own creation in my friend's list. And, in fact, thinking of the English saying of how curiosity kills the cat, I have to smile to myself and decide to be even more curious ;)

.

New blog on Pastel

Casey Klahn - whose The Colorist blog had been one of my early finds full of insightful posts on art process and works in pastel - has recently set up a new blog: simply called Pastel, this new blog promises to develop into a rich and resourceful site for all things around pastel.

Casey's abstract pastel works are excellent and his photos of soft pastels in boxes are just a perfect illustration of why I'm so found of the medium myself. Just have a look at his banner at the Colorist to get a sense of where his explorations of New School Color and abstract expressionism are taking him.

Happy birthday... three months of Paint & Pastel

I'm a big fan of good birthday celebrations - be it other people's or indeed my own. A few days back I realised that, with the first post written on June 26, it's today - September 26 - that this blog is three months old.

When I started blogging, these first three months were mentioned again and again as the time span in which most blogs will falter and disappear. So, quite pleased with myself and this blog for keeping going - here's a happy birthday, with more proper birthdays hopefully coming up in due course.

I treated myself and the sidebar to a new gagdet - a label cloud based on phydeaux 3's excellent instructions here. The cloud is fairly straightforward to create by editing the HTML template, and offers some good easy tweaks and customisation - e.g. colour, fontsize and most importantly, frequency of mention - mine is currently set to a minimum of two for the label to appear. I still have far too many single use labels to show them all.

With the label cloud, searching the blog for particular items is much simpler than using the blogger search function. The cloud also shows easily the different topics discussed and their frequency.

And of course, by playing successfully with the HTML, I'm a bit closer to internet geekdom :)

Seasonal gagetry

... dodging the promised painting tutorial, I've been looking for interesting new blogs and in the process came across blogthings.com - a site full of funny, pointless and cute little quizzes.

One of them reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend a few days back. I was mourning the disappearance of summer (which at least here never really was at all - and that is even accounting for the general lack of summer in West Central Scotland) - she insisted that I was an autumn person in any case, so I should look forward to the coming months.

Quite funny, these classifications, aren't they? To be honest, I would have trouble identifying my favourite season - I usually find that once it's time, I usually enjoy it and find plenty good stuff whenever - be it spring, summer, autumn (maybe in wet, windy winters less so).

In relation to art, I've been thinking about different colour palettes for different times, seasons and places - how it took me time to get a sense of the desert in spring palette and more recently the outdoor painting in Scottish summers. Here, the freshness of spring contrasts nicely with the rich red-orange-greens of autumn, late summers. I've also picked up on how the sky is changing in hue and 'feel' as the year moves on.

In any case, back to the light entertainment of blogthings: which easily and decisively settled the question over my seasonality ;)

You Are Fall!

Thoughtful Expressive Creative Poetic Smart

What Season Woman Are You?

I also very much liked and laughed at the following ones:

Which carnival ride are you?

What muse are you?

And, not to forget: a quick way to discover your hidden talent.

Have fun!

Blogging styles

Autumn skies (turquoise)
Pastel on board, 10x10cm

I am still in surveillance mode - seeing that a fair part of visitors to my blog come to it by looking for painting instructions - like how to paint in pastel? how to paint clouds/skies? Etc. Yet - not many of them stay very long on the site. There are plenty of sites which are in a much better position to offer painting instructions and demonstrations - many of them are on the excellent WetCanvas! forum and its many subject and medium specific subforums.

When I started blogging, the main motivation really lay in a rather selfish wish to create a series of personal prompts to keep working with my artwork and to keep developing it. Quite quickly the interactive abilities of a quickly changing, expanding and communicating website became an important addition - reading other people's blogs, finding out about their work process, ideas and change has proved an important source to move on my own thoughts, ideas and work process.

An interesting post I came across a week back was one by Kirsty Hall, a UK artist and curator who's blog Up all night again has a whole number of interesting and insightful posts on art and the internet - here is the link the post I am referring to:

Different forms of art blogs

Opening with the observation that

One of the golden rules of blogging is that ‘content is king’. All the articles about improving your readership numbers will tell you to ‘write great content’ and ‘post regularly’. But how do you do that? Where to start? It can all seem a little daunting at first.

Kirsty lists eight different blog styles and gives a numer of links as examples.
These styles range from the blog as art, via tutorial and process blogs to news and opinion blogs.

Not surprisingly, I felt that in different posts Paint & Pastel fits into different categories at different times. Much easier than identifying what this blog resembles is to see what it doesn't do - it doesn't intend to be a piece of art in its own right, nor does it post many artworks without commentary. As said above, there's too little on actual instruction to qualify for a tutorial-based blog. I quite happily concede these points and don't feel too disappointed for not belonging into those. Similarly, the blog doesn't cover extensive news of the art world to make it a news blog.

So, let's see what remains:

The subject blog - Paint & Pastel in itself as a title makes the subject and appropriate content of the blog rather wide and not narrowly focussed on one subject. My intention to write on my art and work process is a subject in the sense that I'm trying to leave much other things outside the blog, but they do, of course, come in at one point or another.

The article-based blog - a more extensive and detailed version to the tutorial-based one, Kirsty see this type of blog as one which generates a lot of traffic and commentary. Yet - and here's the problem, it requires a lot of detailed research, background work and commitment to keep producing extensive, well-written articles (which I know all too well from my day work which is largely based on writing, oops... see above)

Which leaves two types - the process blog and the opinion blog - both of which, the latter probably more strongly - seem to be what much of this blog is about...

Reading the post by Kirsty, and some of the more recent ones where she follows up the importance of a web-based strategy for artist has offered some insights into my own views and motivations on blogging - but also provides some routes that could be pursued if I'd like to move towards other styles and develop the blog. Most attractive for that is a stronger article-based style.

Blog gagetry

I do occasionally phantasise about a modernist, minimalist flat and life: clean white lines, spaces and not much else. But everyone who's known any of my flats would laugh out loud at that thought: far too many books, things and generally life getting into the way of those clean white lines. - And quite rightly so getting into the way of them...

I feel that this blog is going quickly the same way... if you drop by here often you surely will have noticed how the sidebar is quickly cluttering up with assorted new items.

In particular the geotagging of the world map made my geographer's heart jump up in joy... and that was nonewithstanding of all the things that I know are wrong with equating people with where they are from (how often was I frustrated to being reduced to being someone's 'my German friend' LOL). But I've nonetheless been examining excitedly the map day by day to see if somebody new would pop up - in particular from those more exotic locations like Saudi Arabia, Hawaii and the middle of the Australian outback.

But also (and again my professional heart was put to contented rest), of course, these maps are gloriously inaccurate - first of all, many people never map onto them, but secondly, my mum would show up from anywhere across Germany (Hallo Jutti!!), similarly my friend in Israel from anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem (I initially I did think my tagging for Israel, desert and Anna Ticho accounted for all those many Israelian hits, again LOL).

It's all good fun to pass the day (sorry: I mean evening, of course) nonetheless.

And an interesting aside has been that I've become much more confident with what any internet technology can do - just look at those photo lists on Flickr or the link to my Etsy shop, and I'm still fascinated how a couple of lines of words and numbers make the computer go elsewhere when you click here. - In the early 1990s I took some of the first computing classes in my school (in fact: the first girl to do so, if I remember) - but keeping in line with the gender stereotypes, I still have to write to this day a programme that actually does what I want it to do - just as well that html tags have got so much more easy.

Tree line repetition
Originally uploaded by gesah

But to end with something closer to paintings - I've started to put some of my reference photos onto a public site at flickr - they are largely landscapes, sky and cloud references so far - trying to keep a reference base for some of the sketches and studies I've been working on. In so doing, I am then, yet again, pleasing my utterly unmodernist self - filling, extending and cluttering to my heart's content.

Enjoy!

Team blogging adventures

... my favourite way to spend the evenings seems to be getting thoroughly lost in cyberspace art worlds these days. I somehow feel similar to when I first discovered the internet 10 years ago: where have all the hours gone???

I've been spending more time with my Etsy shop and trying to find some way around the vastness that makes up Etsy. Etsy seller organise themselves in various street team - to promote their work (e.g. beadwork, or by locality) and to provide a more friendly and personal face to the thousands of shops and their artworks.

One team where I liked many of the members artworks calls itself VAST (see the pun ;)) - the Visual Artists Street Team. After joining them, my blogger dashboard - the interface software with which all these informative blog entries are written and posted - has doubled in size as I can now decide to which blog I will contribute. - Just need to remember to keep checking for which blog I'm creating posts now.

I am excited in the sense that some of the web 2.0 technology just opens up so many possibilities of communication, and a group communication via a team blog seems just like one of the good ones. - And one which makes you easily forget some of the more tedious asides of all this internetting.

Keeping writing... keeping painting

WTTS #13, mixed media on WC paper, 5x8cm


Since I started writing here, I've come across an increasing range of other blogs - many of them are fascinating and the ability to go back frequently to see new posts and comments has been a true insight for a new use of the internet that I did not appreciate beforehand.
One post I came across today and which perfectly brought up a number of issues relating to writing entries on the blog is on Katherine Tyrrell's Making a Mark blog.
In Making a Mark: How do I find things to blog about? Katherine offers a detailed list of how to find topics to write about, how to organise ideas and entries. I had to smile particularly at her suggestions that, when one starts one wants to present all knowledge in one go - rather than breaking it up and organising it more sequentially, narratively - I perfectly remember the desire to have everything on the page at once without much patience of letting things build up. Partly, that probably came from a bit of anxiety and apprehension that I would run out of things to say.
Reading Katherine's post however, made me understand more clearly, that, of course, as well as with most other things, curiosity is created in the process of exploring something - which throws up more questions, and more openings.
In this, blogging is very similar to actual painting/sketching. When I started drawing, I could not for the life of me find things to draw - as if the translation between what I would see everywhere around me to something I would try and put down on paper just didn't exist. With time, it was fascinating to see how suddenly everything around could turn into something to draw/paint - suddenly the overripe pear in the fruit bowl transformed itself into a fascinating still life and the grey low clouds starting showing off their yellow, blues and purples.