Travel in company

Three new recommendations

Hello Friends

I’ve been finding food for thought and inspiration in two fellow painters who have recently started to share their writing and painting here on Substack. Although I’d been aware of both of them for a long time, I’ve been savouring the chance to go a bit deeper with them into their work, their thinking and their day-to-day studio practice.

One for the sky nerds: faint anticrepuscular rays over the sea. Westray in the distance.

The painter Matthew Burrows MBE deservedly gained his MBE for his tireless work setting up and running the Artist Support Pledge on Instagram. When the Covid lockdown deprived many artists of their livelihood, Artist Support Pledge offered a lifeline, a circular economy of mutual aid and a chance to sell small works of art that made a real difference to many artists, myself included, and continues to do so. His own studio Instagram posts are often thoughtful and worth pausing the scroll, but frustration with the algorithms and stunted organic reach on that platform have led him here to Substack. I look forward to his essays and studio notes, which always spark something off and fetch me back into the studio with a renewed sense of inquiry.

Another fellow traveller is Helen Booth, whose paintings carry a stillness and luminosity that, when I’ve had the chance to see them in the flesh, have me rooted to the spot. Somehow they manage to carry much of that same sense of presence even when viewed on a screen. Her reverence for process, immersion in repetition and the expansive philosophy that lies behind the apparent simplicity of her work keeps bringing me back. As she writes:

“I’m increasingly aware that what connects us most deeply is often not what is spoken or visibly present, but what is felt in the pause, in the quiet intervals, in the calm that exists between gestures, words, and moments.”

I’ve known and loved Karine Polwart’s work for many years, first as a writer and performer of tender, powerful, lyrical and often politically charged songs, grounded in a folk tradition yet reaching well beyond that context, and more recently as a creator of ambitious song-and-spoken word audio-visual performances and massed choir intitiatives, often involving many collaborators. Now on Substack too, I have been relishing the expansive, curiosity-driven, deeply researched writing Karine has been sharing in Pockets of Wind Resistance, all of it lit up by a keen sense of social justice.

What I find most inspiring about these three artists is how their restless creativity never stands still. Their expansive sense of enquiry and continual growth inspires me to keep finding my own growth edge, to test new ideas and go deeper into existing ones, and to keep re-examining assumptions about what I know, how I do things and why I do them.

It’s encouraging to feel we are not travelling alone, but in fine company.

The Life Raft Creative Co-Working

Trvael in company company. Join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.

That’s all for this week!

bye for now,

Sam