Things to Worry About (or NOT)

when I wore dresses

 I recently wrote a piece for Febulous February, a writers' blog celebrating Gay History Month; the theme was Letter to my Childhood Self: it took a few liberties with timelines, but

Dear Wednesday,

Good name! Don’t worry, it’s OK to style yourself after a loveable freak; yes, you can choose what sort of weird you want to be. Own it. Control it. Rejoice in it.
Don’t let anyone else choose your label. Choose your own, but remember you can always change it. One day you’ll find more interesting labels, and people attached to them who will become your friends.

Don’t worry about friends. They will come and go but the really good ones will stay and make your life more, better, in so many ways,  and forever. There may be troubles ahead, but honestly you won’t ever be alone.

Don’t worry what people think, and Relax – you don’t need to try so hard not to fit in. You don’t fit in,  because you are fabulously yourself. You don’t have to act it out. (But you can if you like, it’s fun)

Don’t worry about the mirror. No, you aren’t pretty. But you’re not ugly...and one day quite a few people will come to think of you as foxy, enigmatic, attractive, interesting and one glorious day, you’ll be singing in a band and discoing in your bra and...um...Don’t worry about s.e.x. It isn’t compulsory and you’ll figure it out and even (according to one or two instances of unsolicited feedback) be really quite good at it. Don’t worry about boys. They aren’t compulsory either.

Don’t worry about the family legends, they love you really, or the stupid people who mistake you for a boy; or maybe just pretend to, to be mean...you are an excellent girl. Never mind the mean girls who don’t understand you, it’s ok to be a bit brainy and interested in everything and refuse to choose a side,  because all the sides are interesting. And one day people – including you - will be really proud of your brainy...

Don’t worry about God, or the Devil. They’re kind of like Santa, and you don’t have to keep believing in them. Some people do, but trust me,  you’re going to find they get eclipsed by feminism, art and general curiosity. Just be kind...not because your inner nun is watching, but because it’s the right thing.

And don’t worry about dying. That funny lump was just glandular fever, and look, we’re still here, being weird, arty, fabulous...and happy.

With love, always, Fin x

Like most people (who do not have to worry about living in a warzone or in an unsafe abusive home, for example), I worried about all sorts of lesser things from spiders to periods, school dinners to the possibility of Hell. But, interestingly, the one thing I never seemed to worry about was my own future...I had no idea what it might hold but I knew I was going to be an artist. Whatever that means... although being the right sort of weird is definitely a factor. I think a life well lived includes the continous search to be better, more...not richer or importanter or included in more books about modern art...but better at art, at ideas, at finding solutions, and never quite satisfied with what you produce, because you can always see how it might develop next...

How it works

 

How it works: this depends on who you ask

In the morning, the birds make the sun rise by their singing. “Time to get up and warm the sky, we are cold”, say the sparrows. The blackbirds argue noisily, “Not too hot, my eggs will cook”. The robin laughs.

Later, when it is warm, the trees shake their branches to make the wind, and cool the air. Out to sea, where no trees live, the water rolls over and over to make the wind. They push it towards the shore, where it meets the tree-wind, which makes the waves break. All the shorebirds run up and down, paddling in the warm water, job done for the day.

The sea is busy...it pulls the water down off the mountains, like a magician pulling flowers from his sleeve, while the waterfall holds up the cliffs so the fish can climb up. Or down.

When the water is all gone, the cows sit down in their fields to make it rain, and the sea whispers to the rain “come to me, come home”.

When the wind has cleaned the land, and the sun is tired of shining, the birds sing a lullaby and the hills open their arms to snuggle the sun down to sleep.

Then the flapping bats come in, carrying the dark like a big cloak and lay it over everything. The dark has holes in it – thousands of holes made by hundreds of biting insects, horrid wasps and evening midgies.  But the cloak is not spoiled. These are the stars, the holes that let light shine through from the other world; the world of possibilities. The daytime creatures sleep, except for the woman who shepherds the clouds across the sky. While they sleep, new possibilities drip through the holes, ready to be found in the dew on the grass; or in your dreams.

The owl calls the moon,  who may or may not come. Moons are always busy. 

New Year High Resolution

 Be less of a lone tree and be more involved in community. Get out there, join, share. Inspire, be inspired. Stop slamming the door on all the difficult stuff because you think you can't fix it.
No you can't free Palestine. But you can play the drum at a march.
No you can't make women equal and free worldwide but you can protest. You can set examples, you can encourage.
No, you won't be a famous artist filmmaker and the BBC won't screen a retrospective of your work when you die. But you can show it in a festival, online, at an exhibition and people will see it.
Maybe one person's life will be better because they met you, saw your work, laughed at your story, believed they could do that too...

Where do ideas come from (again)

willow pattern...mount fuji

Sometimes ideas just come, but sometimes you have to rummage about for them. Sometimes I envy people who see a beautiful landscape and paint it because 'wow!', but animation doesn't really work like that....so...I'm looking for a pair of willow-pattern earrings to replace some I lost, and found these worn fragments somewhere in the depths of ebay(?). They were the 'wow!' The story developed from china plates, from the idea that Willow Pattern tells a whole story and represents a whole world with a different culture, time, and geography. Then, as I had failed to plan the story got stuck in scones and cake, (possibly hungry??) So I started thinking about a resolution I had made to try to make art that had some kind of purpose. Not like a teapot, more like a Banksy. All Art as Propaganda. The story developed organically (artspeak for saying I wondered around blundering into ideas and discarding or adapting them on something of a well-informed whim) with ideas about climate change and world destruction. Those came from playing in a samba band associated with Extinction Rebellion, and from living for the past 3 years in the middle of hideous and large-scale roadworks on the M1. This was when the polar bear mugs (not traditional willow pattern) were introduced. The title came last...when I had worked out what the point of it all was...something Id seen on a placard at a demo (There is no) Planet B.
Obviously, I was never cut out to work in an animation house where planning is absolutely vital. But the process, the figuring it out as you go...that's the challenge and the fun part. Although drawing scones is also fun.

Out of the Shed and Down to the Seaside

 

Before and After

Am I being more shed? I am trying to be braver, and certainly to accept more challenges. I had made the film of the book, so why not the book of the film?..of an animation I made years ago, in Flash.
I can draw better now, (I thought) and I enjoyed the working process of making a series of finished images which would last longer than 1/25 of a second.
Actually, the best part of the film was the soundtrack, in particular the voiceovers by Paul (the voice of the shed) Baldwin, Julie McBean and Chris Moreland.

The picture book would not have the benefit of those so obviously, that was the challenge to go for. Having completed the drawings I immediately decided to redo them all in a more stylised way, which would have been impossible in an animation. Not that that would have stopped me trying.
Now that retirement from academia has removed the pressure to "publish"...it's playtime. And inevitably, it's also time to feel cut off from a creative community and flounder around eating too much cake, like Annie the main protagonist of The Sea. The story itself dates from the early 1990s, when I was seduced by the idea of a "wordprocessor" in the house. This led to a few short stories and the beginning of an epic but doomed fictional biography of my Great Aunt. Sometimes it is useful to explore a completely different medium -but mainly for the change of pace and the opportunity that affords for reflecting on how a story can be told... as much as asking WHY it should be told.
Annie took her feelings of cut-off-ness and sorrow and made magic out of them. Annie is definitely More Shed.

Be more Garden?

      

painting, gardening, animating...

I often look at someone else's work and you think "I wish I could draw/ paint/ animate/ like that" Or even garden like that. I think this is normal, and one of the ways you learn. So you try to copy the style. It's derivative and a bit rubbish. So you rework it and rework it and eventually end up with something that looks a bit like the thing you admired and quite a lot like your own work. The trick is not to give up or fly off at a tangent down another interesting-looking pathway before you have assimilated. Exactly what is it about that style/ image/artist that is so good? why? how?

Then, sometimes, the gardening will inform the painting and the animation will inform the gardening and so it goes (especially when the painting studio is in the deranged jungle end of the garden)

But animation isn't really about the image... it's about the movement - not an avenue of trees but a waving of branches enclosing the imaginary walker and a rustling of leaves and a sense of being in a jagged green and grey ocean rolling past your feet. It's hard to study the movement in an animation, to investigate how that tells the story. It's easier to spot when it's bad but when it's well done...you're just there in the garden, feeling the sun on your face and the freshness of the air.

    

Mums

Nell waking up... or dreaming

I like drawing old ladies. They have character and no-one expects them to be beautiful or graceful...although they often are. They are full of interesting wrinkles and contours, never bland. Full of stories and symbolisms, usually they embody someone - a Mum, Great Aunt or Grandma - who is important.
My own mother was ill last year - queue panic, what's app group flurries and early morning motorway dashes. False alarm, but it made me think of how people we love never die, so long as we hold them in our memories. But how does that work from their perspective? And how on earth do you indicate in a drawn animation the idea that someone (Nell) is living in another person's memory? Are they conscious, or just a movie which plays? Can they affect the rememberer, or are they just trapped in a time-loop? How frightening to suddenly jump from being 30 in a maternity ward to being 80 celebrating some anniversary. From first date to deathbed and back. Maybe it's like dreaming. Maybe it would be easier to write this as a book! So much, always so very much more to learn...

Be More Shed

nobody puts shed in a corner

Well I did. I wrote and drew not 365 but 366 sheds for The Daily Shed. Lockdown continued. Then I wrote and drew The A-Z of Sheds (so hands up if you knew what a xyst was?) The pandemic continued, so I did 2 picture books of 1-10 interestingly random alliterations inspired by Mervyn Peake. And then 10 more, but sheds. Everything still closed so I continued to search for inspiration by tramp the newly litter-encrusted footpaths of my "semi-rural" locale; Used Facebook to cheer up my chums and myself with comic illustrations, and photos, whilst creating depressingly nihilistic animations. Worrying about the state of the world, about money and bills, joining protests whilst mentally hiding under the bed waiting for the grown-ups to come home. Brooding on the nature of creativity and the meaning of it all. Obsessing about loo rolls, petrol shortages, and Normality...and finally launched into a picture story book about 3 sheds. And then adapted it to an animation. Massive amount of work. Fiddly drawings, 7 1/2 minutes. 

How the hell do you animate a shed helping another shed to make itself a pair of legs, when neither of them has arms to work with...or a face? Why did I write such a difficult story? Because the story was all about words, rhythms, creating images in people's minds...yes, let them worry how to get those legs on. It took so long I stopped and made a joyful 1 minute film (Be More Shed) half-way through, just for fun. This is a privilege.

So now - we still have brexit, corona virus, war in Ukraine and the cost of almost everything is doubling. I still don't have my pension. Enough. I decided to try to use animation to save the world. Maybe you cannot change the world by drawing it, but you can certainly try. Impossibility should never be a barrier to dreams. I will animate the Struggle, the Joy, the Outrage. I will do what I can. I will try to become my best me. I will try to Be More Shed

Learning to Play

 

Playtime! Origami boats and cut/ torn paper animation using the scanner. Playing is such a creative act, it's a shame grown-ups stop doing it... something about the craft activity freeing part of your head to wander, and wonder. More play-parties for adults! (no, I don't mean sex). There is a learned theory about it all, if you want learned (quite a large strand of my PhD in fact) But these days post-academia Im all about the experiential.

This particular fun activity ended up as a story about learning to fly, unrecognizeable visually but nevertheless...
I suppose I could consider the playtime as a sort of pencil-test, a planning tool, a proof-of-concept. I love the freedom of stop-motion collage, but I love the process - and the drama - of black-and-white line drawing.

How short?

Lockdown has altered the nature of time. Milestones have been taken away, markers that differentiated monday from wednesday, schoolday from holiday; and even daytime from night. Some of us succumbed to the peer-pressure to "make better use of this time we have been given". I saw an opportunity to do something different, to grasp for positivity, to keep from going stircrazy and studied an online course in comic books. I don't really like comic books. But the idea of clarity-with-economy in communication, of identifying keyframes in a narrative; and the ease of using speech bubbles instead of having to worry about voiceovers, lipsynch and SFX was very appealing. Instead I have learnt a lot about mark-making with a limited palette (Black. White. That's it, no grey. No chiroscura, sfumato or other posh words for shading. No mimping.) and oh joy a rapid turnover to deadline. A story in 6 frames. 4 frames. a single frame. Published instantly and for anyone who wants it (because people need cheering up, because we want to stay in contact and posting amusing pictures of shed stops me ranting about the obscenities of the current world situation) Tune in every morning to see who likes it. who "Likes" it. who likes me.

Maybe I'll draw 365 and make a book.
Maybe this is a commercial venture.
maybe I need a BIG project as well as a quick one...

But is it art (my inner Foundation Studies Tutor enquires)?
But is it beautiful? But does that matter? I look at the work of other artists, including some I studied at Artschool with and think, Oh that's beautiful, that's art, why can't I do that. Catching myself out thinking that if it's funny or accessible it's not really "art".

Well, alright then, I'm going to make an animation that is funny, beautiful and a tiny bit profound. Just watch me.

Fortunately there are still several years of house arrest under lockdown to accomplish this.

How long, how much more long?

Making animations takes forever. Ideas come faster than the work; sometimes that means the film changes part way through, as your ideas evolve, which is not helpful.
Make shorter quicker films? or be prepared for endless circular editing?
Or make something else: a stained glass doodah, a new design for the website, a mosaic.
I need shorter deadlines for a sense of satisfaction, for more joy.

My PhD tutor used to talk about the notion of "sustainable passion". There is something to explore in the tension between things worth waiting for/ things which are BIG and deeply satisfying, and things which are easily won and smaller. But can we have BIG moments more often? more quickly? Or some kind of middle ground. Is everything worth having, hard work to achieve? (Probably) But does it have to take so long??
What we all need is more joy. More of those profound and positive experiences. Sadly, most people settle for the more easily obtained anger and outrage. Creating things really is better for your mental health.

Strong is the new... sexism

Cactus is completed.
It turned out to have a coherent narrative - which, obviously, was not the one I had written and storyboarded (however sparsely) for it.
Once again I seem to created a hero who is an old lady with a bun. Once again I seem to have created a story about an artist/ the power of art.

I can't decide whether that is
a. sloppy thinking, just looking at what's right in front of me or
b. authenticity, speaking about what I know, understand and feel strongly about
or maybe c. both of the above plus there aren't that many animations about old ladies but the ones I have seen - notably Belleville Rendezvous- have been fabulous. so
I like making films about women and there aren't enough of these
I like heroes who are NOT physically strong or beautiful or overly sexualised...

which leads me to the thought: Why do I SO hate that advert: "Strong is the new beautiful" After years of being told we must be beautiful to have worth, women are now being told that strength makes us beautiful. A Post-feminist loophole that means men can appear to be less obsessed with our outward appearance to the exclusion of any inner characteristics, achievements and skills, yet still berate us for not fitting their model. Beautiful may now have more diverse forms but it is still compulsory.
Sod that.
At least when you are 80 people stop demanding that you are beautiful, sexy, available-for-objectification and physical strength is not expected/ but mental strength and a fierce independence can be appreciated as a somewhat shortage commodity...

So - old lady heroes to the fore! (and no thank you, we do not like the word Heroine. That is a badly-spelled narcotic. Nor the word Shero, which is a tautology since the Hero (personal name) of classical mythology was a woman. and since most of the heros I know are women)
Since you ask, I'm not 80 - nowhere near. But when I am, I expect to still be making animations, possibly about 100-year-old women.

Home (again), home again, dancing a jig

caddis fly contemplates the nature of home

The film of HOME is finally finished, though I doubt it is more eloquent than the blog post about it from earlier in the year! perhaps I should write more and draw less. It happened. It was fun. I found time to untangle the stupidity of simultaneously
*working on 3 films at the same time - 2 finished, one still not, 
*recreating a 4th film which was lost (when you keep thinking, but wasn't there another version of this, with woodlice in...but you can't find it and start to wonder if you only dreamt it...and then find a crappy DVD copy in the bottom drawer-under-the-bed of the hard drive and manage to extract the soundtrack to go with the 3 million bitmap images)
*writing a narrative (NARRATIVE! No more sloppy organic evolution of non-linear wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey ..oh no sorry that's a quote from Dr Who) about a woman who is also a cactus...for which idea I am indebted to a wet afternoon at a craft fair and a Joni Mitchell track, and mostly 
*running. Which has kind of taken over my life until after September 8th (Great North Run).
From now on maybe stick to one thing at a time? Oh wait, I could make an animation about running. Finally a proper use for the walk/run cycle cliche.

Sound and Image: who's in charge?

circular screen area? why not?

Re-editing...making a 1-minute movie out of a 2 minute movie. How hard can that be?
When you constructed it in an unorthodox way - as an experiment in drawing style, and the raw footage is in a ludicrous format... very. harder than starting from scratch...but it's also hard to let go of a really pleasing visual and a hard-won storyline.

So you cobble together a method and start rebuilding...and then the software, stretched to breaking point by the non-standard usage - breaks.

So you start again.

But then you realise the whole last section COULD go and the narrative element of it just be hinted at with a final image. Great, more punch, more focus. Unfortunately the very end doesn't work now. Visually, yes, but once you have remixed the new soundtrack it just peters out/ or the final sound doesn't match the final image...and suddenly you are redrawing the end , the last seconds, over and over until something clicks. And you wish you'd paid more attention to boring conventions like maintaining separate layers and keeping backgrounds and bitdepths...

And you are musing on the relationship between the sound and the image, how the pace of one affects the pace and the texture of the other. On the relative merits of the gradual fade and the big bang ending...

And then finally you finish having spent days on producing one minute of animation.

And it's a different film.

And it was worth it.

Home

Home is where ancient aunts do crosswords and tell stories of alien worlds with polo ponies and flying fish, where Meccano is on the floor, and John Peel is on the radio.; the Aunt is gone but the crosswords and the music linger on.

Home is where the hills are round and green, clotted with sheep, where you can see the watertower from the top and from that same old walk over the railway bridge with Grandad; the Grandad is gone but sometimes the driver still toots as the train goes under.

Home is when you pass the sign “West Sussex” and punch the air after 7 hours gnashing your teeth on the motorways, when Angus the Satnav voice says 20 minutes to go and Mum has already boiled the kettle  twice. Where you are always welcome and always loved.  Where you are always a child.

Home is here, now, where I am grown up. My own house, full of stained glass and found objects, craft experiments and junk. My own shed. A place of steeper hills, decorated with horses, old waggonways, an angel. The sea, endlessly sandy and fringed with not-quite-islands. Where I hope one day to have “my own seat” in the local pub, where my neighbour works.  A community. Who don’t care who or what, only if you help with gritting the steep end of the lane.  

Home is family. The family we build piece by piece, carefully, like Meccano. Brothers who become neighbours. Lovers who become sisters, acquaintances who become best friends.  Friends ­- who know us as we are and who follow us when we explore who we might be, holding the torch. Ladies of a certain age who socialise at lunchtime, go for nice walks then go home and take our bras off –  just because we can. Who still debate politics, discuss Shakespeare, giggle over love affairs and the prospect of retirement; who struggle to make art. Who still march, but sometimes with a trekking pole. Who might sometimes go clubbing, but are home in time to watch Vera on catch-up.

Home is a snail shell I carry around, full of fragments; fragrant with memories;  light enough to wear everyday.  An identity- that survives different towns, villages, careers, fads, friendships, lovers, samba bands and girlie gangs – enriched and expanded by them all. A beautiful patchwork; a steampunk, Faberge caddisfly case. A place of safety. A place of strength. A place to start from.




I wrote this for "Febulous February", it inspired the image, and the image is now inspiring a film. Sometimes, good can come from randomly trawling social media!

New Year Resolution part 2...Pen

Pen -  a tiny animation

Tidying the hard-drive, finding a failed submission for an E4 channel ident...instead of binning it I decided to re-examine, recycle, and start from an existing sequence to see where
the animation would go. Approaching it as I would walking, and increasingly, drawing. Having fun. It went into images of cages, surveillance, midgies and scary birds.





Sometimes you have to let the story tell itself, and not try too hard to impose a meaning, a moral, a reason. They come.

New Year Resolution part 1 - Drawing

bathroom fish - pen drawing

Besides the usual knee-jerk eat better, get fit, call your mother more often (all of which I am doing quite successfully so far) I have resolved to do an observational drawing every day. In a shiny new sketchbook. It doesn't seem very much, for an artist, yet surprisingly difficult to keep up when you are thinking "I spent all day drawing animated fish, now I have to do a flippin still life?" and when dark evenings mean drawing indoor things (yes I could draw in the mornings, but that's when Im now going running!) and you suddenly realise how much you want to explore the vague and raggedy-edged shapes of the garden, the neighbours' ivy-loaded tree, organic things, instead of hard-edged manufactured objects and square walls. How the cat can sit immobile for 6 hours but begin to prowl when you decide to draw her.
Like the running, it's an exercise - for the drawing muscles. Building up stamina, imaginative capacity, interpretive ability, libraries of sorts of marks. But what begins as a discipline soon becomes a delight. Probably endorphins.

WHY?

... do we make art? Out of love? compulsion? habit? When one compulsion - the need to keep up a sturdy research profile for the forthcoming REF and impress your boss - is removed, the other imperatives rattle around a little before settling. Without realising, we can let our work be steered by external forces - the need to make a living, to comply with a client; even if we work only for ourselves around "a day job" it can still steer us away from creative experiment and towards the safety of a successful formula. So lots of experiments. A list of 4 projects - 2 waiting to be started and 2 that have been begun and swept aside in the excitement of the moment of starting work on a fifth. (and then a sixth) Not much discipline, but plenty of joy. I will finish them all. You probably don't need to read about them

Miki now in Xmas paper & a snowglobe

and then - christmas on the horizon. Everyone is asking me if I am doing another advent calendar. But it took so long last year...can I start another project? Yes apparently I can... with animation projects 7,8,9 and 10. An opportunity to have fun with pattern and stop worrying about realism. An opportunity to play with variations on a theme...using the research, drawings and ideas I'm already working on but without the pressure of a complex narrative. And these have the virtue of being short, so relatively quick, and a cast-iron date deadline, which none of the others have. And an audience. Actual feedback. closing the circle.
Happy Christmas/ Hannukah/ Solstice/ Festival of friends-and-family

So I finished another film ("Man")

... big news. Not really, but it has already created the need for another film. A follow-on, a deeper exploration of some of the ideas I floated past in this one:
1. the representation of gender and why do we put up with it.
2. the generation of ideas, how and where does it happen.
3. sorts of wooduct-ty marks and how to economically animate them
4. blah blah something to do with the presence of the artist within the work...the self-referential recursive fractal thingummy.
This happens when you have a tiny animation trying to contain several big ideas.
Your head gets full.
Sometimes of fish.

ideas...and how to catch them

(from a series "musing with mates").
What if ideas are just floating around in the air like Terry Pratchett suggests, waiting for a receptive mind to provide a conduit - an earth? When I was very young, I imagined babies as little souls, floating around over the earth waiting for parents to call them down and come and be born. That they watched, hopeful, in the skies when potential parents began to speak about starting a family, nudging one another - "you'll be next". This is what you get for teaching obscure tenets of Catholicism to children too young to understand...Similarly, what if ideas, like energy, like static before a storm, bursting to discharge, were hopefully seeking a receptive mind...like a hyperintelligent alien, having travelled millions of miles through vaccuuous space, and seeking someone to whom it could pass its momentous message from another galaxy...How to become such a mind...is there an artists' tinfoil hat or antenna? a drug as Carlos believed? a head tattoo, a magic sign like a crop circle which will attract them?

Or maybe, as Richard suggests, the creative mind is a muscle like any other which needs training, regular exercise, and a warm-up before getting up to speed. A warm-up like a series of bad, weak ideas you toy with and discard. Or a knockabout, a conversation with a friend, batting idea-ettes back and forth but neither trying to score a point... Or a blog... 
Do your scales, run through the exercises and get ready to Be Creative.

Like a visit to the gym, a visit to Being Creative needs some preparation. Empty your head. Transfer those things it is full of to paper, or sort them out - and they are gone. Drive them out with tiredness from a long walk, with the excruciating boredom of a staff meeting, with astonishment at some fabulous thing seen or heard that you can immerse yourself in, beside which the boring little idea of worrying about the leaking roof, remembering the laundry or caring why whatshername never posts on your facebook anymore will wither in embarrassment and shuffle off to a sleepless sunday night. Play with a ball of wool, a cat, or the garden.

Dress suitably. Comfortable clothes that will not restrict the free movement of ideas. Desperately chic vintage weirdness. Pyjamas. Your brother's old seacadet jumper which is too tight and unravelling at the cuffs. Does it help, if you look and feel like An Artist? Or just provide a handy excuse for days when the ideas don't seem to come..?

Always carry a pencil, a pen, paper; something to occupy your hands, something which provides sensory feedback - the sound of graphite scratching on paper, the vibration from the drawing action travelling up your arm. If you are chosen by an idea, if you spot one passing by, if you sense one bubbling up from some corner of your mind, write it down. Draw it. Doodle, expand, experiment...shamelessly. Ignore the CCTV, ignore everything...

Immediately, the idea will begin to evolve, to morph, to develop an attitude...it will decide who or what it wants to become. There will need to be a period of negotiation, which may be long-drawn-out and fruitful; your work may become a true collaboration between yourself and the idea... Like the characters in a novel you might try to write, the ideas will refine their personalities ; they will become confident and more assertive and eventually undermine your illusion of control. Help them to satisfying conclusion, to a narrative integrity, to a beautiful or a meaningful or an ecstatic expression. Help them communicate themselves and then, if you love them, let them go.