A gentle invitation

to join me in the studio.

Welcome back to The Life Boat, sallying forth again after a couple of weeks in dry dock!

2024 is, I hope, going to be a year of creative immersion in the studio for me, thanks to the support of the MacRobert Trust Art Award for Painting that I was lucky enough to receive late last year.

work in progress….

I’ve been thinking about how to navigate this time. While the recognition and support of an award like this is a wonderful opportunity to grow creatively, it also brings with it feelings of pressure, imposter syndrome, performance anxiety and self-doubt.

But it’s always the practice I come home to. Doing the thing. Entering the space it makes. It’s where we find balance and focus, where self-consciousness falls away.

In The Clearing I wrote a little about the refuge that drawing has always offered me since I was little. This excerpt, where I find a dog-eared drawing of a horse that I made as a child, explains the sense of possibility, adventure and yet also safety, that I believe the imaginative space of creativity can open up for all of us:

I drew picture after picture like this one, of girls like myself riding half-wild horses with tangled manes and strong, galloping legs. Or just horses, free and self-reliant. I seldom kept the drawings, nor did I show them to anyone. That was not the point. I did not draw to communicate or to gain praise or attention. I did not draw for others at all. I drew for myself.

The A4 sheet was my playground, a big, white, open space I could move into and feel how wide it was, how anything was possible here. No matter how narrowly constrained the rest of my life might be, here I could move around freely in a world of my own shaping.

Fold it away. Turn the page. Smooth out a new sheet of paper. Lift the pencil. Draw again. To draw is to pull something towards or behind you. Drawn towards, to draw out, this word, drawing, has longing and movement and love in it. To withdraw: it has privacy, and safety in it too, contemplative retreat. Long drawn-out: it has time in it, patience, endurance and tenacity.

With all that’s happening in the world right now it feels more necessary than ever to have this quiet space of creativity. For me, drawing has always provided this place of refuge and rebalancing. Writing came later.

But what was missing for me as a lonely child, drawing only for myself, was the sharing. Because that’s what it’s all about. Doing the thing, and then sharing it. Doing the thing brings us home. Sharing it builds a community around that home.

So I’d like to invite you to join me in an experiment. I’d love to share with you not just the final outcomes of my time in the studio but also the quiet, contemplative, creative space of doing the work. As we ease ourselves into this new and uncertain year, I am opening up a co-working Zoom session later today, just for subscribers to The Life Boat.

(Please scroll down to the end of this post if you’d like to read a transcript of this video)

You don’t need to be an artist, or even to consider yourself especially creative to take part. If you’d like to draw along with me, I’d love that. As you can see my process just now is a simple one that anyone can do - just dots, dots, dots - as I finish this painting. Here’s a recording from last week…

If you want to work on some writing, that’s wonderful too.

We’ll just say hello and introduce ourselves when I open the Zoom room, and then each of us will quietly get on with our work until I call us all back together to close the session. It’s nice to leave our cameras on, so we can feel accompanied as we work, if you’re comfortable with that.

And if you are doing some other kind of solitary work and just want to get on with it quietly alongside others for a little while, that’s fine too. My hope is to offer a gentle, shared space in which your creative work, whatever that may be, can be supported.

Here’s the meeting ID: 898 6171 0406 and passcode: 968054 just in case you need them.

I hope to see you shortly!

Sam

Video transcript below:

Hello, and welcome. Welcome to my studio, this is where the action happens. This is a painting I've been working on for a few weeks now I'm hoping to get it finished this week, maybe next week, got a bit of a push on to do that.

I just thought I'd pop on the video and say hello. There's been quite a few new people joining The Life Boat, joining us here in the last couple of months. So hello, and welcome. I've been thinking about the year I have ahead, and I'm sure you have too, and the time that I'm hoping to be spending in the studio painting, and how that can become quite solitary. And that sharing the work and sharing that space is part of the work and build a community around what we do.

So I would like to invite you to join me in a bit of an experiment to create a co working space. And what I'm going to do is open up zoom, co working space, this afternoon in UK time at 3pm. The link will be at the bottom of the post, you'll see that below. And it's simply to work together quietly on something that we are working on at the moment. It could be something creative writing or drawing or any other work that you are sitting on your own doing and feel that a little bit of quiet company would be pleasant. So I'll open up the Zoom Room, maybe spend the first few minutes just see who's around, say hello. Maybe somebody will come and that's okay, because I'll be working anyway. So you can pop in and look over my shoulder at what I'm doing. That's absolutely fine. And yeah, we'll work together for about 40 minutes or so and then pull things together at the end. Yeah, nice to see you if you can make it along. Say hello.

Hope to see you later.

Bye!