Now I’ve always known that my creative work varies noticeably with how I am feeling. Obviously this personal acknowledgment is not from a serious, in-depth, psychological assessment, but just a vague, airy-fairy type of observation.
I expect you’ll find this mini challenge/quiz all too easy. These ‘sequence’ photos are a selection of the scarves I’ve painted so far this year. They are a before lockdown and during lockdown series. As an aside, how good it would have felt to have been able to type a sequence of ‘before, during and AFTER images’. Soon, we hope, soon. So which are the before and which are the during scarves?
I think it’s quite obvious, you’ve probably guessed but here are the answers to confirm your no doubt perceptive choices.
For me it goes thus – chirpy, energetic, outward-looking, and my work is bold, loose and conspicuously colourful. Conversely, hit a pessimistic period and it’s all introspection, lethargy and hints of moroseness, and my work becomes contained, restrained and muted. I have to say it’s never been quite so obvious as this!!!!
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Agnes Ashe 
Thanks for explaining so carefully.
You’re welcome – it’s often the photos that do the leg work for our Blog posts isn’t?
Erm, I didn’t get it all right actually. What you see as muted, I see as gentle and at peace with the world. What you see as loose and colourful I see as on edge, albeit in a most attractive way. I got SOME right. But more by luck than judgment. Ah well.
That’s really interesting I was chatting to my daughter on the phone and she said pretty much what you’ve written. She thought it was the colours she responded to and associated with how she felt about all that’s going on and, knowing me quite well (!!), she thought that had been shown in my creative response too. 😊
That’s quite amusing. It turns out we’re not open books after all.
When we first returned from our road trip and went in to voluntary self-isolation I had some extremely vivid, unsettling dreams. Then they stopped, and I just seem to be tootling along quite happily in my cocoon, even though lock-down is not all that more out-going than isolation. Perhaps you’re feeling the lack of external stimuli to convert into creative pieces, and just wishing it would all be over? But all the pieces look lovely to me, and I guess each will appeal to a different personality.
Oh yes, I have heard quite a few people talking about the vivid dreams. I suppose that’s a normal response in anxiety-laden times. Actually, I haven’t had a fall-off in ideas, but my actual productivity is the problem. Everything, from routine tasks, creative work, and, even housework and gardening is taking me twice as long as usual for some reason. It’s as though I am submerged in treacle.
Hmmmm, perhaps because you are not under time pressure. If your diary was full of commitments , you would rush to scrunch the “chores” into the free spaces.
I guess it’s all a bit Parkinson’s Law – ‘work expands to fill the time’.
I guessed right. I feel the same way. Circumstances are draining some color from my art energy, literally and figuratively.
Yes, and I don’t know about you, but everything is taking me twice as long to complete as well.
Me too. And I feel very shaky about my ideas, usually I am full speed ahead, getting energy from the process as I go, but right now, I do have to work harder to stay in touch with what I am doing.