A sketchbook recently filled – vibrant markets and fishing villages in Southern Portugal.. a tiny film.
My big love is being outside in the landscape and drawing and painting. I have just returned from a lovely ‘milestone’ birthday trip to Portugal where I got to do plenty of that and, unusually for me, worked in just one sketchbook and filled it up. Would you like to see? I enjoyed the sights and smells of market days particularly and depicting these bustling, loud and mouthwatering days was my inspiration this time.
This is also my first time filming my sketchbook – so, fingers crossed!!
I spent some of the holiday drawing and painting with my good friend Mary Price and we hoked up for some of our time with another woman, Julie Sajous, a new friend found loitering with sketchbook and pens.
This common ground of drawing (followed by eating and drinking) is such a uniting factor you know! In times which seem to polarise people we need to find our tribes, connect and lift each other up!
Painting alone and painting with friends – such a great way to connect with place and people. Here are me, Mary Price and Julie Sajous.
That’s me on the left looking like I might fall over backwards into a cactus!
I would love to hear how you record your travels if you do.
Do you draw or photograph and do you think there’s a big difference? Or maybe you keep a written journal? Let me know in the comments ….
Sketchbook colour trials and a pastel da nata (very lifelike!!)
Having turned part of the garden over to wildflowers and seen significant increases in insect and bird population I am looking at the connections between these two concepts…
Exploring Enchantment: A Journey of Wonder and Connection
Enchantment is an elusive yet profoundly impactful experience that invites us to see the world through a lens of wonder and interconnectedness.
Enchantment in Art and Life
In my art manifesto, I touch upon the concept of enchantment as a means to generate new and helpful myths for the future, working towards the re-enchantment of human beings and human actions suggesting that art can be a powerful tool to reconnect us with a sense of wonder and meaning.
recent mono-print from a small project observing crows, ravens and corvids and investigating the mythology of them – this is Branwen the white raven from Wales – 2024
Literary Perspectives on Enchantment
Katherine May, in her book “Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age” describes it as a small yet magnified wonder, a sense of fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. She emphasizes that enchantment relies on small doses of meaning and fascination, found only when we actively look for them. It is the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, and to be sustained by it. She says:
“I don’t have words to describe what it meant to play with my moon shadow. Instead, I feel it in my body, a kind of physical wonder at what is there waiting for me when I stop to notice.” p.221
This perspective highlights the subtle and often overlooked aspects of enchantment that enrich our daily lives. My personal word for 2024 to hold in mind is “NOTICE” – it’s a helpful one – it invites slowing down, deep looking, investigating effects and affects on the self and sometimes recording in images or words.
Raven monoprint – the legend goes that the crow pulled the light from the heavens to give to our world – 2024
Enchantment as a Way of Being
Sharon Blackie, writing on Substack, offers a definition of enchantment that is grounded in a vivid sense of belonging and participation in life. She describes the enchanted life as one that embraces wonder, engages the creative imagination, and is deeply embodied and ecological. It is about respecting the wisdom of the natural world, thriving on poetry, song, and dance, and living slowly and ethically. Enchantment, for Blackie, is about falling in love with the world anew and making a conscious choice to nourish our bruised psyches. Her approach underscores the holistic and integrative nature of enchantment as a way to live fully and meaningfully.
A small crow painting completed recently – integrating crows into the environment as our ecosystem – 2024
Personal Reflections
In my own practice, I find that the deliberate pursuit of attention, ritual, or reflection does not draw in anything external but rather rearranges what I already know to find new insights. This symbolic thought process offers a repository of understanding that can be triggered by everyday experiences, creating a physical sense of wonder when I stop to notice. This personal reflection aligns with the broader themes of enchantment as a means of self-discovery and connection as well as cultivating a sense of awe as I described here in a piece about drawing outside and cultivating a sense of awe.
Recent watercolour made outside recording a bird singing in a tree in Loulé, Portugal – 2024
Are you ready to embrace the multifaceted experience of enchantment that invites us to engage with the world in deeper and more meaningful ways? Whether through art, literature, or personal reflection, it offers a path to reconnect with the wonder and magic inherent in our lives and that creates meaning for us – something we all need and something we can cultivate in noticing the weeds in the cracks in the pavement and our own plants in window-boxes, balconies and gardens or in walking in our neighbourhood or out in the wider countryside if we have access to that.
Watercolour observational sketch whilst listening to the birds in our local park – 2024
Wilding and Re-wilding (a film)
I am currently researching the concept of Wilding and Re-wilding and as part of this I am looking forward to seeing the film ‘Wilding’ next week which is on at smaller cinemas currently. (Local friends I am going to the Orbit in Wellington, Telford on Friday July at 2.30 – join me!!). Wilding tells the story of a young couple that bets on nature for the future of their failing, four-hundred-year-old estate. The young couple battles entrenched tradition, and dares to place the fate of their farm in the hands of nature. Ripping down the fences, they set the land back to the wild and entrust its recovery to a motley mix of animals both tame and wild. It is the beginning of a grand experiment that will become one of the most significant rewilding experiments in Europe.
Searching out and finding it there all the time in the slow and silent time between Christmas and New Year: finding a new direction. Not all who wander are lost….
I treated myself to a lovely Mary Fedden book for Christmas and haven’t been able to put her down. Whilst at this still point of winter where I sometimes sit in an uncomfortable art fug, trying to peer into my future art direction, I decided to look at painting, as she did, some entirely domestic items.
Having also purloined (gifted to self) some rather juicy Holbein gouache tubes and hauled myself from a mince-pie eating stupor, I played with a small painting in the manner of Fedden, only 18 x 13cm which suits this medium. It’s called ‘Julia’s Tea Light’ – still the usual bird theme, rather decorative and still using a bit of imaginative daydreaming as is my way.
I think it would translate well into a larger oil painting; when I enlarged it to print it out, the brush strokes showed nicely. I do love the way gouache paint can mimic watercolours (in the fat end of the squash) and opaque oil, all one one handy travelling palette…
… and travelling is coming up – so I am thinking I might take these materials to France in January where I am house sitting for a couple of weeks in the Languedoc (animal rights you know!) to explore the landscape and the domestic (there may be cat paintings of George and Zuzu and there are those beautiful Langedoc floor tiles!).
Then I was also thinking about how I often use my iPad to change my physical work on paper and whether I could develop some kind of studio diary in the future. I am completely inspired by the lovely studio journals of Mrs. Bertimus (I am fortunate enough to have purchased one of her beautiful paintings for my lounge) and although I can’t say that I can match her prowess in the tech side, I had a go this afternoon and think I might continue on in this way and perhaps show some here. Something like this:
Anyway I can see that it will unfortunately lead to any members of my household finding it even harder to catch my attention in the New Year, but when I am travelling I think I am going to like the combination of physical and digital. I am finding writing is an increasingly useful way to explore the scrapings from my mind which usually dance away into the atmosphere to somewhere I know not where ….
Will you join me in this diary form and follow along ? Thanks for reading – I appreciate knowing you are there. A great place to follow my posts is on Substack where I am enjoying a longer form of writing. Here is the link
If I look at most of my paintings over the last few years they almost all feature birds. Do you remember in lockdown in 2020 how we, if we were fortunate to be able to, spent such a lot of time noticing birds in our gardens and parks, the drop in traffic noise, the stillness rarified by fear amplifying their song?
During that time I was struck by the activity in the garden of the birds and I began to paint them, almost sanctifying their presence by placing them against imaginary stained glass windows. They started to become symbolic of freedom and adaptability to me. There seemed nothing freer than a bird, able to go wherever it desired, able to adapt to the buffeting of winds and forces of nature.
Two oil paintings made by myself during lockdown 30 x 30cm
What was the freedom I craved?
at first it was definitely a ‘freedom from…’ away from the city, the griminess of urban decay, away from domestic duty, peace from interruptions of children, family, spouse, responsibility, obligation,time constraints and room for spacious thinking time and epic landscapes.
then I seemed to move on and the symbol came to stand for ‘freedom to…’ a feeling of wanting to run for the hills, to the wild open spaces of Wales, to the mountain tops and valleys, to quiet contemplative woodlands with ancient trees where I could feel rooted and amongst the ancients.
eventually, as I worked through these challenges I realised that the freedom lay in my head all along, I didn’t need to do a geographical relocation, because I learned to manage a work life balance and prioritise those activities (and non-activities) that kept me sane. I can go into those another time but as I realised who I really was, the shift came and the symbol stood instead for ‘transcendent thinking.’ The understanding of who I am, what I am and what I am here for became my work and fulfilled many of the needs I thought I had. The hills, wide open spaces, mountains and valleys, places of contemplation and rootedness were all within.
Jung and Symbolism
Along the way I started to become interested in the work of C.G. Jung, the father of psychoanalysis (after Freud with whom I would have a difficult relationship!). Jung was particularly interested in dreams and symbols developing a process he termed active imagination.
Jung’s ideas fed into psychotherapy, art therapy, dance and music therapy all part of the panoply of psychological release available today. All the time the idea, for him, was to allow us to get in touch with our true self and find the senses of purpose that we all need.
Jung himself was a mystic. He filled sketchbook after sketchbook with notes and drawings which he called the Black Books, which were eventually consolodated into the most beautiful work The Red Book, or Liber Novus which he stipulated should not be published until after his death. It is filled with astonishingly beautiful symbolic watercolours. Jung was a mystic but he kept it hidden from the scientific world for fear of being discredited in his field of psychoanalysis.
A page from Jung’s Black Books which represent his visionary imagination through writing and painting reflecting on his own life as well as the evolution of a theory of analytic psychologyThe Cosmic Egg from “The Red Book” by Jung
Jung also became fascinated by alchemy as a symbolic representation of individuation, the process of synthesis of the Self which consists mainly of the union of the unconscious and the consciousness. He said:
“Only after I had familiarised myself with alchemy did I realise that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious”.
Jung developed a method of assimilation of unconscious contents through their experimentation as fantasies in the wakeful state which he termed ‘active imagination’. This can be used in or out of the therapeutic environment as a journey of possible self discovery on the path to individuation or self-realisation. I have played with this approach myself through recording my dreams, which are often of birds, and making more resolved work from the dream-sketches:
Examples of my dream-sketches, ‘Dreamworks’, quick sketch later worked into, graphite and acrylic on paper, 20.5 x 15cm, 2023Dreamworks 4’, watercolour and Neocolour II sticks on paper, 21.5 x 28cm, 2023, writing in corner shows the ‘Gayatri Mantra’ which was in my mind on waking. This a mantra used in Hindu based meditation practices concerning invoking light.
Meta Thinking / Transcendent Thinking
This work has lead to further thought, for me, about the idea of being metahuman. To be metahuman means to move past the limitations constructed by the mind and enter a new state of awareness where we have deliberate and concrete access to peak experiences that can transform our lives from the inside out. I would count drawing, meditation and walking in nature as being peak experiences. Athletes and musicians often experience this state when performing particularly well. You might call it ‘being in the zone.’
Waking up, we learn, isn’t just about mindfulness or meditation. Waking up, to become metahuman, is to expand our consciousness in all that we think, say, and do. By going beyond, we liberate ourselves from old conditioning and all the mental constructs that underlie anxiety, tension, and ego-driven demands. Useful insight on this is Deepak Chopra’s ‘Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential’ much of which draws from ideas from the Upanishads and Vedanta teachings of ancient India.
This I would say could be called transcendent thinking where transcendent doesn’t mean going above, but more working alongside from a different perspective.
The combination of meta thinking, ideas of alchemy and symbolism have resulted in some interesting and helpful personal development. Combining this with study of Sanskrit texts such as The Upanishads, The Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita has made for an enlightening journey. Long may it continue!!!
… and the birds continue… more paintings
At a recent three person exhibition, ‘Sprezzatura’ with Julia Burns and Rachel Magdeburg, I was able to show some of the paintings resulting from these dreams and imaginations. They are all available to see here (they are at a very good price for a VERY limited time – let me know if you would like to purchase) but here are a few:
‘Axis Mundi’- Acrylic paint on paper – 71 x 120cm -£300‘Om Kara’ – Acrylic paint on paper – 73 x 73 cm – £300‘Thinly Veiled’ – Acrylic paint on paper – 72 x 74cm – £300
I have put the prices of these paintings here and there are more on the link page too – I unashamedly am selling these for funds for next year’s PhD fees and my travel related to drawing and painting in my beloved Campervan – a place for spacious thinking. Let me know if you would like to purchase. Postage is extra, at cost, and the work will be sent in a strong tube for you to choose a frame. Get a bargain whilst it lasts because through a gallery …. well, you know …..
This week has been a full on one but it’s exciting. Two other artists in the studios have teamed up with me and we are going forward as a collective called ‘The Working Painters’. It’s a great boost to have a collaboration, and whereas I have generally worked a solitary bod I have really seen the power of working together this last few weeks. In the past we have loosely critted (is this a nice new word?) our work and thoughts together and now it’s time for a show of this year’s outputs.
Why now?
You know what? …. it’s hard to get gallery representation, or even work shown in the city art gallery where we work, and it’s sooooo easy to moan about that. So we decided to up the energy and organise a pop-up, renting the community hub which is a massive white ex-shop in the Mander Centre our city shopping mall here in Wolverhampton, England. The town is really down on its uppers, struggling to stay alive and the only thing we can do is to contribute to it with colour and hopefully inspiration for others to do the same. We want to buck the system!
Can we inspire?
We hope so – we want to show a way to beautifully curate on a limited budget to encourage others – individuals or groups – to have a go at doing the same. We are not having a catered Private View – but we are having one (!), and we are hanging in a way that others could replicate easily …. you’ll have to come to find out how.
‘Om Kara’ – Clare Wassermann – acrylic on paper – 73 x 73cm
About the title ‘Sprezzatura’
The exhibition title Sprezzatura typically means an appearance or style which assumes to be effortless but hides the endeavour involved in its creation. Many of the paintings exhibited here have been re-worked, painted back, painted over, scrubbed, rubbed, tonked, scratched, smudged, printed on, wrestled with and agonised over, and in fact the paintings often leave traces of these tussles. Some of the paintings came into being with less of a creative struggle as if not made by the artists at all. Nonetheless, the work of painting is always work, a matter of turning up and loading a brush.
The artists
In a series of new work, Rachel Magdeburg has painted objects that have a personal resonance, and obliquely reference the practice, material techniques and processes of painting. Some of the pictorial imagery reveals a semantic playfulness, which is reinforced by the painting’s titles. Other paintings explore formal relationships within a work itself, and in relation to the motifs of other paintings. Rachel has just completed a doctorate in Fine Art and she is glad to be back to painting!
‘UnPalatable’ – Rachel Magdeburg – oil on board – 61 x 51cm.
Julia Burns’s recent large scale paintings employ a continuous dialogue, both intuitive and directed, with the very messy process of painting, along with a playful reference to a “mixtape” of Modernist and contemporary abstract painting, to create works that allude to the Urban landscape as an experience and an idea.
Julia Burns’s studio.
Clare Wassermann has been working with the symbolism of birds in her paintings as part of an ongoing investigation into the concept of liberation and alchemical transformation towards internal freedom as part of her PhD work.
‘River Swimming, Dolanog,’ Clare Wassermann – acrylic on paper, 120 x 79cm.
I you would like to purchase one of Clare’s pieces but can’t get to the exhibition
There is an online catalogue here. Please get in touch to reserve your work – the beauty is there are no gallery fees so the work is affordable (subjective term I know!). The work can be purchased online and posted at cost. Framing advice is available of course.
Please get in touch if you would like to purchase work by Julia or Rachel. Better still, come and meet us and see it in person. A catalogue will also be available online soon.
You can make quite a night of it!
You can go straight on to this if you come at the end of FridayEvery last Friday of the month, the doors of Wolverhampton Art Gallery will be opening after hours to welcome you in.
Each event will be inspired by current exhibitions. Expect live performances, music, workshops and curators talks throughout the gallery spaces.
Plus, the Glaze Café will be opening late to ensure you don’t go hungry or thirsty as you see your way into the night. Lates are adults-only, after-hours theme nights.
This Friday Lates is a double feature! Friday 27th & Saturday 28th October 6-9pm.
Friday 27th: there will be screening a documentary about the life and work of Derek Boshier.
Join British-Jamaican Artist and Educator, Exodus Crooks for an ink and collage workshop inspired by Derek Boshier’s Smile (1968). Throughout the workshop, participants will be invited to recreate an image they have on their phone, using found images, magazines and newspaper cut outs.
We are happy to work to mentor artists who would like to buck the system and put on their own show. We can offer advice and encouragement. Do get in touch with me if you think you would benefit from this service in the future.
And please do subscribe to my newsletter on Substack – I will be adding to it most weeks and I’d love your comments if you like!
Just a quick post to say my studio at Makers Dozen Studios at the rear of Wolverhampton Art Gallery is open as part of the city wide open studios on October 8th and 9th from 11am – 3pm. If you miss it I can be there by arrangement the week after too – just email me clare.wassermann@gmail.com. The gallery has a new and very lovely cafe ‘Glaze’ on the ground floor overlooking St. Peter’s Gardens which could be a welcome pit stop.
Julia Burns and I have opened next door to each other at Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
Details of more places to visit on the art trail in Wolverhampton can be found here care of Wolverhampton Society of Artists. All venues are free to visit.
Anyway do come and see what I have been busy with this year. I will have cards and paintings for sale but do come and just say hi in our new more normal world.
Julia Burns is opening in the little gallery space next to mine. More of her work can be seen here – she is a wonderful Urban Abstract artist.
Clare Wassermann Art 