23 - what is interesting?

What's more interesting, a Paris skyline or a dirty window?

I would have unquestioningly said the former but on a recent visit to the Pompidou centre, my mind stimulated and frankly mixed up. I found myself unnervingly attracted to the latter.

It's dust and scratches shimmering in the light and creating textures and patterns of infinite variety.

The thought came to me that there is of course no difference in it's interestingness.

Take a walk from here to the end of your road and look down as you do. 

See if you can find at least 10 objects along the way that catch your eye, to photograph.

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

(Elliott Erwitt advertising and documentary photographer known for black and white candid shots of absurd and everyday settings )

22 - get lost in colour

Investigate the effect of color on your behavior and feelings.

Take yourself off for a walk, a slow walk. Pick a colour and focus on it all around you while you do. 

Take your camera along and capture the colour in as many shades from as many sources as you can.

Cool colors can evoke both calm and sadness. Depending on the intensity. 

Peaceful, dependable, cool blue is the most popular color, it can still the mind or feel cold and unfriendly depending on your mood?

Red can feel Passionate and provocative but also aggressive. It can be cozy or mean danger, commanding us to stop in traffic or just stamping it's foot and demanding attention.

Just notice how your chosen colour makes you feel?

“Speed kills colour... the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray.”

(Paul Morand novelist, poet and early Modernist)

"Colour is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically."

(French Expressionist Painter, 1866-1944).

21 - Continuous line

Synchronise the movement of your eye with the movement of your pencil. Move slowly and steadily.

From the start of the drawing to the end don’t let your pencil leave the paper.

Be aware of the thread and fluidity, the connectedness of each aspect of the image you’re creating. The tying together of it all, as if the drawing was being fashioned with wire. Let it overlap itself as your pencil weaves around the page.

When One tugs at a single thing in Nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

John Muir (1838 - 1914 Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and conservationists.

20 - bury your watch

Just for one day in your life refuse to be a slave to time. Bury your watch in your sock drawer and turn your clocks around.

The world won't come to an end just because your not ticking away, your day may even seem a lot longer.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. 

William Faulkner (1897 –1962 Nobel Prize-winning author, poet and screenwriter).

19 - express yourself

On a recent trip to Amsterdam. I was struck by how much self expression was put into peoples highly individualised bikes. I myself can't drive and my bike takes me everywhere but I've never considered customising it or really enhancing it in any way in particular. I guess the point here is that, in Amsterdam, bike theft is an everyday thing and a good proportion of inhabitants wouldn't consider leaving a new or expensive one lying around. Whilst it's easy to get precious about something perfect, an old rusty bike is a blank canvas, calling out to be embellished. Your personality is bound to be infused in the result. Take something you're thinking of throwing out anyway and see if you can make something quite lovely out of it?

Expression of one's own personality, feelings, or ideas, as through speech or art: "Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment" (Pearl S. Buck)

18 - take note

This is more about observing and capturing a thought or a moment, than impressing yourself. 

I like to use a cheap unruled notebook. The cheaper the better. 

I steer clear of moleskin and the like, It'll only make me care too much. 

Interestingly, I also find it stops me hoarding. If I have a record of something, I don't necessarily need to keep hold of it.

“Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. . . . Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”

 William Osler (1849-1919 Physician, described as the Father of Modern Medicine, pathologist, educator, historian and author)

17 - set yourself to macro

On a walk home along London's South Bank with my camera, on an uncomfortably cold Feb' day. I started to notice I was thinking about where I wanted to get to, rather than where I actually was. 

I'd become so familiar with the scene that I hardly noticed it at all. My companion said that this was why she loved to travel to far away places, because England was "just too familiar!"

I could obviously see her point, as was told in the way I was marching off towards my tube station but it didn't feel quite right!

I walked the long way back to my train station rather than getting the tube and decided to look out  through my lens. Once my camera was set on macro a much less familiar place opened up to me. 

It opened the idea to me that when I get into that way of thinking, I can always set myself on macro and view a new world of detail, colour and shape and texture... a lot cheaper than flying to Thailand!

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail”

 Alfred North Whitehead (British Mathematician and Philosopher, 1861-1947)

16 - sit there

I'm quite sure that I've spend as much time thinking about life as just experiencing it. I'm becoming increasingly aware however that when I do have a change attention from thinking to just plain being there, I  feel a lot happier and generally more connected, time slows down and it all feels less like hopping on and off a fast train. There's room to breath and notice and enjoy a simple moment of not very much happening.

“Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment.”

J. Donald Walters - (Yogi, author of over 100 books and the composer of over 400 pieces of music, speaks Italian, Romanian, Greek, French, Spanish, German, Hindi, Bengali, and Indonesian)

Don't just do something - sit there!  

Author Unknown

15 - your doorstep

What inspires me about my own culture...

Well humour is something I really appreciate about where I live. It's used to establish a good atmosphere, to bridge differences, introduce odd ideas and to show appreciation or contempt. 

I like it that the British joke about everything... the queen, politics, religion but most importantly ourselves! 

Understatement too is a brilliant thing... "Not bad" actually meaning "very good" and "not bad at all" being the highest praise.

There's also nothing like a nice cup of tea!

“A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.”

 Russell Page (British landscape architect) 

14 - ugly beauty

Quite a few beautiful things, are really pretty horrid, and many ugly things are quite good in one way or another. 

Insect-eating plants are uniquely beautiful and captivate the eye of all who behold. 

Each produces shimmering leaves lined with glistening droplets of glue that attract, trap and kill insects and other small animals in a fairly ghastly way. 

During a walk in the park, I found myself turning away from the perfect blueness of the sky and became transfixed by the marbling of scum on a dirty pond. It lead me to question which was the most beautiful, at that moment, I had to admit the scum was strangely and surprisingly more captivating.

“It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us. Our thought make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds.

Swami Vivekananda (influential spiritual leader of the philosophies of Yoga and Vedanta 1863-1902)

13 - celebrate pegs

Take time to notice the simple and ordinary. Wander around your house or street with a cheap camera. Don't bother about taking clear or precise shots, just notice what's all around you in the raw. The blander the better, a sock drawer or a peg on a washing line.

As you get drawn into the minutiae of it, you'll begin to notice it's actually quite intriguing.

I've become unaccountably enchanted by pegs and buttons.

“The greatest discoveries have come from people who have looked at a standard situation and seen it differently.”

 Ira Erwin

12 - investigate aversion

For me music has an instant way of bringing underlying aversions to the fore - maudlin music, for instance takes my mood down to a place I instinctively and fervently try to avoid. 

A friend suggested I try doodling whilst listening to the very music I'd normally avoid, using it as a kind of soundtrack or prompter for the pencil. 

The result was fascinating and what's more, when my chattering mind stopped complaining and busied itself elsewhere, I found the emotions it brought out were a lot less bothersome than I'd first imagined and made the doodle a kind of visual representation of my emotions... quite a cathartic thing!

Unexpectedly, I also developed an unaccountable fondness for brass bands!

“The senses have been conditioned by attraction to the pleasant and aversion to the unpleasant: a man should not be ruled by them; they are obstacles in his path.”

Bhagavad Gita (Composed between the 5th and the 2nd century BC)

11 - a special place

Set aside a special place, even if it's a tiny area of the house. Two of my most inspiring places are in fact my under stairs cupboard in the winter and my garden shed in the summer. Both places close off distractions and help me single pointedly focus. I suspect a big cardboard box would do pretty well!

10 - jumbled words

Takes a finished draft of something you've written or something existing in an old book and cut it up with scissors. The cutting can be of paragraph, sentence, phrase, or word by word, or a combination of all of these. 

After cutting up the writing, stick the pieces back together, experimenting with different ways of organising the paper until you feel most happy with it. (Magnetic words are good to use too if you have them).

Making serious sentences into silly, witty, whimsical or Nonsensical verse is very freeing and is very good if you're feeling uninspired.

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”

 A. A. Milne (English Humorist, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, 1882-1956)

9 - question function

It's an interesting question - how we define objects by their function? 

We’ve given them all these different names but what if somehow, one day we forgot what they were called, would we start to look past their limitations?

If on the other hand we start to recognize that what we see and understand is simply one view of what is, we have the start of an awakening and an expanding of our view of the world. 

Have a good throw out of any clutter, it'll clear your mind and you'll find all sorts of funny little doodahs you don't want to throw away. Well keep hold of the bit's that intrigue you and put them in a little box. then think about recycling them into something completely different!

I became quite attracted to the colour and textures of carrier bags and decided to heat fuse them into a rather natty bracelet and a poor man's stained glass window!

I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes. 

Augusten Xon Burroughs (writer - New York Times bestselling memoir Running with Scissors (2002)

8 - get lost in a zentangle

Zentangles are a way of creating images from repetitive patterns, a process of doodling that brings about a meditative state. This is the meditative state in drawing that is needed to tap into your best creative energies. It increases creative freedom and creates a shift in focus and perspective. Because you have no idea what its result will be when you begin it's not restricted by your expectations and can be quite profound creative meditation.
To relax and intentionally direct your attention while creating something quite beautiful is an uplifting experience. I find it an excellent starting point for any creative undertaking.

"Any mind activity is much more likely to be beneficial and to be creative if it's preceded by presence and stillness."

Eckhart Tolle (author of The Power of Now)

“In deep meditation the flow of concentration is continuous like the flow of oil.”

Patanjali (150 BCE - compiler of the Yoga Sutras)

7 - the unobvious

It's easy to get enthused about a sunset, or a white sandy beach but if you look a little closer and open your mind, you'll see beauty all around you. It's in the detail of a frosty crisp packet or the sun glinting on a crushed tin can by the roadside. 

"Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed". 

Lebanese artist & poet (1883 – 1931)  

6 - new eyes

View something with new eyes. Take something you wouldn't normally be attracted to. stop and just look at it for a while, but without the internal dialogue... you may develop a new fascination and even learn to love something that once repelled you!

“There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.”

Denis Diderot (French man of letters and philosopher, 1713-1784)

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see. 

Leonardo da Vinci 

5 - blind contour drawing

If you think about what you're drawing too much, your logical left brain chips in and tells you what the subject "should" look like and the result is fairly uninteresting. 

Blind contour drawing is a method to fool that left brain and hence avoid this. It was popularized by kimon nicolaïdes in his book the natural way to draw (1941). 

Fix your eyes on the outline of the model or object, draws the contour very slowly in a steady, continuous line without lifting the pencil or looking at the paper. 

Look at the paper to place an internal feature, but once you begin to draw, don't glance down, let yourself go, find a stillness and concentration in just looking and following.

The result is what your right brain sees... and it's all quite charming and endearing.

"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness".

Eckhart Tolle - (German born spiritual teacher and author of ‘The Power of Now’)

4 - your favourite film

It seems like an obvious suggestion, but you can always say no to a trip to tesco's, put your slippers on, close the curtains and watch your favourite old film?... the world won't come to an end if you go shopping tomorrow!

Take a look at what is it that makes it your favourite film, there's probably something quite profound going on. perhaps something about it moves that right brain on a fundamental level.

"Today's a day of big decisions - going to start writing me novel - 2000 words every day... I'm going to start getting up in the morning". 

(Tom Courtney in Billy Liar 1963)

3 - sand sculpture

Why on earth do we often let kids have all the fun. Something about the seaside sets you free, so take advantage of the feeling and build yourself a fantasy... and if you don't live by the sea, take yourself off to a wood and build something with sticks or stones!

“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”

 Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

2 - mess it up

Do something for the hell of it, pretend your 6 for a few hours... what would you do?

Um well, maybe not! 

Perhaps a doodle is a good start. you probably did this naturally as a teenager, so have a go now, take a serious looking photo or illustration and mess it up with a colourful doodle!... there, that's created something much more interesting!

"In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play."

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

German philosopher & postmodernist (1844 – 1900) 

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better. 

- Brian Eno

 English musician, composer, record producer, music theorist  (born 15 May 1948)

1 - mind map

Pick a word, idea, or theme and take yourself on a journey of new avenues.

I took the word “purpose” and freely allowed words to come rather than editing them. You may come up with an entirely different set of connections and that is the point of mind mapping.

Have a go... don't stop at words, add any images that come to mind too?

"Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instictive thinking."

Malcolm Gladwell  - (Author of ‘The Tipping Point)’