Divinations, declarations, and whispers

Divinations, declarations, and whispers
mixed media on unstretched canvas
160x106cm/62.9x41.7"
Megan Chapman  

I spent the rest of last weekend making the seals for the bottom of the painting. Each one is hand stamped and painted. This week I went into the studio to apply them along the bottom of the piece. I also added any glue that was needed on the collage bits and did colour matching where the tape had been holding the canvas up against the painting wall. After that, I spray varnished the painting to protect and seal all the mixed media elements. You can watch the Tuesday Studio Video Visit below for a more in-depth discussion about this if you missed it on social media.

  

Today, I went back into the studio to check the varnish and give the piece a last once over to make sure the charcoal was properly sealed. I also wanted to go over it again with another coat of matte finish varnish. I recorded a couple of quick supplemental videos today that you can see here.

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And here

   

After I decided that I was pleased with the varnish and that everything else was in order, I decided to take the painting for a walk through the studio and take a couple of photos of it temporarily installed to get a better sense of it out in the world along with a few detail shots below. 

Thank you again to everyone who has been so interested and enthusiastic about this latest painting. It has been fun sharing this piece and the experience of creating it with you. 

After the way

On an 8-mile local walk this week

There was the blog that I wanted to post today and the blog you are getting. 

I started the first option yesterday, writing about the 10 days on the John Muir Way with my niece Elena, but found it quite overwhelming as I just couldn't focus in the way I wanted. But I have started and will finish it eventually. I decided to just post something for this week and take some of the self-imposed pressure off. I can't believe it has already been a whole week since we got off The Way and took a train back to Edinburgh from Dunbar. 

This week was a return to some sort of normalcy. I hadn't been on a holiday in so long that I forgot about the odd phase right after. So, I tidied up the house, unpacked, did laundry, and watered the plants. I checked in with friends and some family. I caught up on some sleep (I didn't sleep that great while on The Way) and took a few naps. I returned to some work and mentored an artist and took care of business emails, I recorded my Tuesday Studio Video Visit and attended scheduled appointments. I applied for and received my Scot Rail "Club 50" Smart Rail Card (for reduced-priced train travel). I visited a few friends, took myself out for a chai latte, and I made sure to walk daily, anywhere from 2 to 10 miles. I threw in a couple of sessions of aerobics and some yoga for good measure. I realised that it is these more or less daily exercise habits that enabled me to "just go" on the 135-mile (official) John Muir Way (it was 170 miles in total with extraneous walking) over 10 days, spontaneously without too much issue or injury. 

I must admit that right now everything seems a bit dull. I miss my effervescent niece and I miss the task of simply putting one foot in front of the other with a pack on your back and winding up in a farmer's field, a scenic glen, or in a grove of trees by the sea and sleeping somewhere new as you go. The nomadic life (of sorts) appeals to me. Constantly moving forward, exploring, with only a few responsibilities, and all under your own steam seems like a good way to spend time on the planet at least periodically. There are so many lessons and learnings on the way.

Getting out on a few longer walks this week (I even stepped out on a bit of the local John Muir Way again) seemed like a good way to transition and to remember how much local beauty there is that I get to explore each day. I feel very fortunate.

I know this is an art blog - but I also know that walking factors into my art. It certainly factors into my enjoyment of life and allows me the space to listen to my head and heart and to get clear about things. 

I think that is all I have for you this week, a return to normalcy - a simple post about a simple joy. 

Until next week, take good care.

The Holiday Continues!

I am still out walking somewhere between Helensburgh and Dunbar Scotland. Perhaps I am by the sea or in the middle of a farmer's field. Wherever I am, I am loving it.

See you next week.

Welcome the new

The maps have changed
mixed media on 200gsm acid-free paper
42x59.4cm/16.5x23.4"
©2020 Megan Chapman
£300

A couple of art things happened this week, I think (remember what I said about time in last week's post).

I was delighted that one of my latest paintings, 'The maps have changed' was used in the SCAN (Scottish Contemporary Art Network) member mailout. I am a proud member of SCAN. Find out more about the organisation and consider joining. We are stronger together! https://sca-net.org/about/. It is always rewarding to be able to have my work shared within a community of my peers across Scotland. 

In other news, I tried something a bit different and with some trepidation. I have been wanting to create some "Artist 101" style guides for artists just starting out for a long time now. Perhaps for the artists that may not have any other means of moral support or encouragement or those that won't have the opportunity to go to art school or are returning to art from a break. Sometimes we all need some friendly and helpful advice especially when it comes to calling ourselves, artists. So, I created a colourful and fun 8-page pdf to help us gather up the evidence, gently step into our truth, and believe in ourselves and our art! It's a short, sweet, and kind guide to thinking a little differently about putting ourselves out there. I am offering it in my ko-fi shop starting at £3. I hope to make other guides in the series soon. It's a bit of an experiment just now. Thanks to those that have purchased and those that previewed my wee guide so far. Suitable for most ages and experience levels. You can find it here, https://ko-fi.com/s/706ceb33e5.

Of course, this is election WEEK and I have been glued to CNN feeling cautiously optimistic... 

The world needs you and your art, your thoughts, your passion, your heart. 

Thank you.

Bicycles for Refugees Fundraiser and Open Studios!

My second fundraiser for Bikes for Refugees is happening now! If you recall, I created 10 works on paper last spring to benefit this important charity organisation and thanks to you, all 10 works sold! We were able to donate £550 to this worthy organisation and I am hoping we can do the same again before the end of the year. 

This latest series of original paintings are A4 sized - 21X29.7cm/8.3x11.7” mixed media on 280gsm/80oz primed canvas board. They will be signed and dated on the back. Each piece is £135. These new works are value-priced for charity and this includes shipping to anywhere in the world. £55 from the sale of each piece will be donated Bikes for Refugees and will put a bike in the hands of a new Scot. 

The bikes are donated to the charity from lovely folks and then the organisation spends money and time to service the bikes, making sure they are roadworthy for their new owners. Each bike also comes with a lock, light, and a helmet. It costs £55 to get a donated bike up and running for new Scot. So each time a painting sells, that's another bike we can get on the road for a refugee. Here's a short clip of me speaking about how I was inspired to help this charity. 

I gladly accept bank transfer and PayPal (if the buyer can kindly pay the PayPal fees). Payment plans are also available (take up to 3 months to pay off your painting if needed). I want you to live with original art and I want to help this important charity. Message me to reserve your painting today! Gratefully, four pieces from this series have already sold! Thanks, patrons! 

Here are the remaining available works. I would love to sell at least 6 more of these before the end of the year! Please share my blog or my facebook album http://bit.ly/2KhrKy4 of the paintings and help spread the word. Thank you. 

Also if you are local Edinburgh, my studio G23 will be open this Sunday from 12-5pm along with my friend, textile artist Mairi Brown in F14. We will have our doors open alongside the Makers Marque event at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall located at 36 Dalmeny Street in Leith. It would be a great time for you to come and see these new charity pieces in person and pick up one for yourself or as a gift. 

Until next week, keep fighting! We need you here alongside us creating change and beauty. 

It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

What a difference a few days make... Thanks to everyone who read my studio blog (posted this Monday for last Friday). I really appreciate the comments and private messages - I still owe a couple of you replies. Thank you for reading and for your concern, suggestions, and support. You are beautiful people and artists that give and give and give. I see you.

So... I spent most of the day on Monday writing that blog and I felt much better afterward. Thanks to some of the feedback I received, I was planning to take it easy for a spell and spend some time on the wee beach across from the house after I filmed the Tuesday Studio Video Visit. I was getting ready to head out to my studio at the Drill Hall with every intention of filming from the 25th Anniversary exhibition there, but then something else happened. 

I was invited to pop by a fellow artist's studio and have a wee cuppa and a blether. I thought that sounded grand, so off I went, putting my plans for the day on the back burner. I had just purchased a lovely piece of work by this artist about 2 weeks prior. That is when we met for the first time and I was looking forward to saying hello and getting to know this artist better. As luck would have it, her studio was just down the road - a few minutes walk. I had passed the area many times before without notice due to a large gate, this time I entered through a wee door and into a fabulous old complex of stables built around the 1840s. It was a hot and sunny morning and all the doors were open to allow the old space some sun and air. I met my new friend and her beauty of a dog and was shown around the charming place before we stopped for our coffee chat. I exclaimed as we entered every room -excited and inspired at once. Ferns growing in a pocket of damp, the old cobbled floors, and ivy trailing through the ceiling in parts made the place feel like a country dream. The curved rock wall and solid old beauty just made my heart sing. As I think you know, I love the old crumbling things and have wanted for a long time to stage an exhibition in a space like this. Possibilities were screaming out from every corner with photos to be taken, art to be made, and secrets lost to history to be heard anew. But, I was just there for coffee and was happy that my new friend had such an inspiring place to make her art. 

We chatted in the sun and at some point, she asked if I would like to sketch in the courtyard. Very generous and kind, she had read my last blog. Perhaps a change of scenery would help. I already felt more inspired just by walking through the place. There was one room in particular that jumped out at me, and somehow I asked if I might be able to paint in there sometime. I was thinking for a day or two... she was keen on having me work there for longer than that. In fact, on the spot, she gave me a big broom, dustpan, coveralls, bin bags, and a bucket of soapy water. A plan was hatched! I spent the rest of the day there sweeping until I had blisters on my hands - propelled by her generosity, the wonder of the place, and a head full of possibility. As I was sweeping, I found the word "freedom" on the floor. 

I filmed my Tuesday Studio Video Visit from the space, red-faced and shocked with joy. 

On Wednesday morning, I was given my own key - putting it on my keyring felt important. I am thinking of this opportunity as an artist residency of sorts to help me gain a new perspective and to focus differently on my work. I have wanted to paint larger for quite a while and this space will allow me to explore the possibilities. I went to my studio at the out of the blue and packed up some essentials - paint, charcoal, paper, brushes, canvases, and called a pal to help me transport it. I also ordered a couple of large canvas/twill drop cloths to protect the old floor and a 5x33ft. roll of primed canvas! I spent the rest of Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning sorting things out and by the end of Thursday I had a completed a painting from my new dark series and worked on several small book works. 

Newly completed painting

Today, I worked on another dark series piece. I, of course, love everything about this experience - how it came about, the generosity, vulnerability, and trust involved. I am thankful for this more than you can know and I am excited to see what comes from this time.

In March I wrote these words, "you'll find me standing against the decaying and water-damaged walls of abandoned houses listening." Well, that's where you'll find me...

With gratitude from my heart to yours, keep fighting and keep giving. Beauty is where you find it. Thank you.

One thousand arrows point to the uninitiated

Freedom is available to you if you want it. If you will allow it in. Freedom is so revered and yet so feared. Most of the obstacles I put in my life are of my own creation. Most of the limits I put on my art are as well. Realizing this is a huge step and at the same time it seems so obvious.

I know I am free to make and do any type of art I want and that you the viewers, the readers, the gallery owners and the patrons will go along for the ride. The work will either be appreciated or it won't- and that is all there is to it.But now what to do? Sometimes all this freedom seems too much.

Right now everything feels like a riddle as I paint the works for my show "Fire and Noise." The original goal was to create art with more "me" in it or more meaning that was personal to me. People have encouraged me to express what is within, but they also offer conflicting advice to try it this way or think of it that way, use these colors but not these, remember this and explore that and don't rely on this familiar device but do make it easy on yourself, let go but perhaps just not like that.I know they are trying to help me reach deeper within and offer guidance as well as new ways of thinking about the problem.

They sense that I am frustrated and searching or that I am holding something back, and they are not wrong. One of my favorite Interpol songs, has the line "I have seven faces, thought I knew which one to wear..." and this has always resonated with me. When I am painting I tend to try too hard to maintain just one of the seven faces and I box myself into a corner. With the knowledge of true freedom comes the ability to put on the other six faces. I worry that if left to my own devices my work could become inconsistent or groundless and this is uncomfortable to me. I then start listening to all the voices around me and become overwhelmed.

Just as things seem to work on a Monday, they can also fade away by Thursday and I am back at square one. What am I after? I sometimes feel like an actor asking "now, what's my motivation?"

As I was working yesterday, trying to express something (something = the true problem, it seems my signal got jammed this week, it started off questionable and bleak, then moved into useful and familiar and then got so filtered and watered down that somewhere I lost it), I found myself attacking the surface with pencil and scrubbing pad, marks and words.The surface was absent of color, and it was so many things I wasn't, so unsatisfactory. The end result was like a piece of forgotten homework left in a mud puddle. Tomorrow I will go back to retrieve it, and I will attempt to return to the pure state I used to know, where color meets color and perhaps nothing more.

I will step once again into the fire and noise, and attempt to deflect all one thousand arrows...

Flow along with the tide

The type written text on my old painting to the left says " ...day to day. Each of us should be willing to flow along with the tide and not set up resistance against anything that comes. This is necessary so that growth and redemption can occur." I wish I could say where this text originated, all I know is that it came from a free bin book I retrieved from the Smith Family bookstore in Eugene Oregon. The text then became a part of my art in the book series I did in 1999 for my B.F.A terminal project. This message has come up for me in many places in my life, and was an unexpected gift when I started writing my blog today.

I was stumped for the first time, I just didn't know what to tell you this week. Then I thought about returning to my origins and sharing some of my older work with you and the process that inspired it. I knew I liked this piece of mine, but I didn't remember this powerful note on the cover. Those words must have struck a chord with me when I was 27 and they still do today at 35. There is so much resistance to battle inside ourselves, especially when it comes to creativity. I remember that book was supposed to be my artistic version of an imagined "cult deprogramming manual." I put duct tape on the spine of this flimsy book, painted it a stark white and glued my red and black paintings in the middle of the taped together and painted white pages. The idea was that the imagined cult member would look at the book and the images would reset their memories and they would be restored to the person their family remembered from before the cult. This was when assuming characters and scenarios were an important part of my work. In school anything was possible as long as I could convince my professors of it being authentic and fully considered. Nothing was for sale, so I was truly free to explore all the levels of my creativity. It was hard, and sometimes ridiculous "art school" fodder but it was so rewarding. Today, I explore my creativity, dream up stories and conceptualize my current work as well, but it has changed.

The photograph below is the first black and white photo I made and developed in a dark room. I took one photography class while in school. It was the most nerve wracking experience. I was always a nervous mess in that class. I was so out of my element, but I found a voice inside of me that I never would have known about, if I hadn't done it. The dark room for that term became my anxious friend, long hours in that warm darkness with the chemicals. I felt so accomplished when I spent time in there.

The photographs I took were all about detachment and abandoned living. I was living in a slum apartment in downtown Eugene that I dearly loved. I loved it because of its decrepit beauty. The enchanting style of the 1930's courtyard apartment was still easy to see even with the gangs and junkies nodding off on the stoops. The cast of characters that lived in the apartment became my family and sometimes my subjects. This photo captured one of my neighbors on his stoop, a day in the life. He was extremely tall and lanky and I liked his fluid movements.

We all have origins to our art, I am now known for my use of color washes and texture but the origins of my work are black and white with dark dirty colors and text. What makes us do the work we do and what makes us change? I was living in Oregon, and feel sure the rain and atmosphere of where I lived helped to inform my work at the time. The freedom of being able to create art for art's sake while living frugally on my student loans and work study surely influenced my work as well.

Here is another page from "the cult deprogramming manual," and this was my favorite page of the book. The book consisted of a cover image
(at the top of this post) three images inside, and then an image on the back cover. On this page, I loved the way the charcoal and white gesso swirl together to create a cloud like form. I actually think this piece is one my favorite pieces I have ever created, yet it remains closed up inside this book, except for times like this when I pull it out. That was another thing about my books, the paintings were closed up tight and not on display. They required action by the viewer to get to them and to receive them. At this stage all my peers in school were painting large glossy abstract paintings, and I was vehemently opposed to them. I enjoyed their work but at the time I didn't want to go along with the crowd. I now make much larger, sometimes glossy abstract paintings full of color and I am not living off my student loans anymore, in fact I have paid them all off. I may have compromised, but I have also expanded my ideas as needed to fill a need in myself and others. Back to that statement above, "...day to day. Each of us should be willing to flow along with the tide and not set up resistance against anything that comes. This is necessary so that growth and redemption can occur." See how this keeps making sense?

There are many serious artists, art lovers and collectors in the world. There are also people with plenty of judgements. I think artists are the harshest judges of themselves and their work and each other. We want to make "real" art, not something easy to digest and gentle on the eye. We want to stretch, we want to impress, we want to feel something and for others to feel it as deeply as we do. Yet, to live this artistic life money is now required. Sometimes we resist this, sometimes we hesitate and we second guess our authenticity.

In this photograph, on the left side is an old and abandoned child's wheel chair, and on the right a close up detail. This was found in the "prop closet" in the drawing room at the University. What always struck me were the wooden toys across the arms of the seat. How long was this child going to be in this chair? I had never seen a chair like this. The toy's wooden beads were now faded, and an old colander was in the seat. I liked how beaten up it was. At the time the photo was made I was focused on the objects beauty but I was also probably grateful that I was never required to draw these items.

Where are your works' origins? Do you question the work you are doing? Are you making the work you want to be making? Will you compromise in order to really make a go at this? And how much? Are you judging yourself or others too harshly? All I can say, as I ask myself these same questions is... Keep moving forward, keep flowing, and keep fighting.