I like this quote from Ray Bradbury which touches on the unconscious layers that drive our creativity, and offers a fair sense of what’s going on for me when I am working. “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” – Ray Bradbury
Last year, in the summer, Hansa Yellow appeared a lot in my work. It had first cropped up in January, in a response to a prompt in Cheryl Taves’ ’30 day sketchbook challenge’: “What comforts you”? After first thinking that it would be tough during the early months of each year that I find particularly hard, to identify something comforting, I was surprised how quickly, as if from nowhere came this yellow filled circle. I chose to paint it in watercolour, not acrylic or oil. There is for me, something straightforward about watercolour. Once it’s on the paper, the properties of that pigment shine out. You can take the risk of altering it, and in most of my work, I do, but that is always a journey full of the risk of ‘failure’. Watercolour offers few opportunities to ‘correct’ ‘mistakes’.
For the rest of the summer Hansa Yellow continued to appear in my work.
Visit my site blog page to see more examples of the work developed last summer and autumn that showed the influence of this heart-warming colour.
