We often limit our creativity to the fields in which we are trained. Can exploring new territory enrich our experience?

© Thomas Eagle with CCLicense

Last fall I was attending a concert, a lovely performance, while exhausted and deeply afraid of falling asleep. In order to stay engaged with the music, I covered the back of my program with a variety of plantlike textures that the sounds suggested to me. The experience was so therapeutic that I have found myself drawing with increasing frequency.

The five drawings that I am sharing with you today form a set titled Metamorphic Fairies. They started out as free draws, something like large scale doodles.
The elements are organic shapes, some plantlike and others more animal in nature, fused and juxtaposed. They didn’t make much sense to me until I read Jo Walton’s novel Among Others, inhabited by strange organic fairies.

In the same way that oak trees…

But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously.

―K.J. Bishop, The Etched City

Public Domain Image: Calvary Cemetery, Queens, NY, USA