Taking a Break
After the assessment I was feeling a bit empty and so decided that it was time to take a little break. So, the timing was great for our family to leave the North-West and head down to Cornwall to visit a friend, who we aim to visit once a year. This was exactly the sort of break I needed. Staying with Mary always provides a great balance of rest and inspiration. The view over the Tamar valley is great, her house is filled with wonderful paintings, prints and lots of pottery and we are close to all sorts of great places to visit.
I purposefully did only very little pottery related activities except for browsing through her late husband's pottery books, telling her all about my experiences on my MA course and catching a glimpse of some ceramics through the window at South West Crafts gallery in Tavistock.
I normally do a few sketches while here but this time my output was very meagre and none of them really involve patterns:
One day we visited a friend of Mary's in Princetown. Matt Buckett is a painter, designer and illustrator who just recently moved into his new studio the Duchy Square Centre of Creativity. It was great to see how he approaches his business. To make his company Ink Pot Graphics work he really spreads his activities from running small adult art classes and hosting kid's art parties in his studio, doing commission portraits of pets and people to designing new beer labels for a local craft brewery and writing and designing his own comic books (The Weapon). He is a very engaging person and I am sure it will work out for him.
I really enjoyed his Ink Sketches, which are selection of ink drawings made as part of an initiative run on Twitter called Inktober in which people are encouraged to create and post online one ink drawing a day throughout October. I felt there was a certain crossover between his approach and mine when creating the initial drawings for my creatures. He did a set of random ink splashes, which he then turned into characters or scenes.
One week was just about enough to disengage and recharge my batteries. The landscape of Dartmoor was exactly the sort of rugged emptiness I needed to clear my mind to be able to regroup my thoughts in order to move on. Now I'm looking forward to the next steps in my MA.
