What lies beneath?

Not just champagne bottles, that's for sure.

Jun 22, 2024

They say art retreats are for exploring the creative process within a supportive and safe environment. People talk about becoming ‘vulnerable’. I guess it’s only when you go on one, you discover what that means.

*Swirling vortex of doom aside, I’m quite a cheerful person*

Last week I did something I’ve never done before: I travelled to the wilds of Shropshire, for an art retreat. Sure, I’ve done residential courses (ten years of, to get all my City & Guilds qualifications) but I’ve never done an art thing where:

I didn’t know what we’d be doing (other than that it would involve some drawing, very likely in the form of small thumbnails)
I didn’t know what the outcome for the week would be - there was no specified goal (as far as I knew) - no qualification, no certificate, no defined outcome
I didn’t drive myself there, so I was totally reliant on others, and no escape! More significantly, for an art retreat, that gave me a limit to how much I could take in my luggage as I’d have to carry it across London and beyond, on and off trains and up and down escalators and stairs
I was told (categorically! I queried it! I was getting twitchy!) I didn’t actually have to take anything, other than myself, my clothes and toiletries. And you know what? I stuck to it! Apart from a pencil case of felt-tips…ahem
I had absolutely no idea who else would be going

However

I did ‘know’ the tutor Tansy Hargan, but only through social media and from taking several of her courses. Which is why I figured we’d be doing a fair few thumbnails…
Thumbnails duly completed in tiny sketchbook
…but despite a few years’ worth of social media exchanges, and a few transactional emails, we’d never actually talked or met face to face.
I did know we’d learn how to make watercolour paints, because she said so
Purest Green, Panther Pink, and Remembered Hills Blue
I did know it was my birthday week so why not
and I did know that if I’d seen photos on social media after the fact, I’d absolutely kick myself for not going.

But considering I thought I had no expectations at all, and tried to keep an open mind, the week didn’t pan out how I thought it would, at all. At all, at all. In fact, I’d quite like to go back to the beginning and start all over again! And I know I’m not the only one. We have a group chat on Instagram, and we’re all feeling the lack, now we’ve travelled back to our ordinary lives…for some, that’s more than 5000 miles away from where we all met. And what a wonderful group of creative souls to spend a week with - definitely not enough time.

Right from the off, the first task completely blindsided me: considering the concept of a ‘manifesto’ to set the tone for a week of creative exploration. For sure, I’d actually been thinking about this a lot, anyway - what my personal manifesto is, including what this Substack space right here is about (more to come on that another time) so maybe I was feeling a little bit smug, thinking I was ahead of the game. But I’d never considered that a manifesto can also be something we’re signed up to unwillingly - through parental influence, or society.

A postcard showing a can of worms being opened by a tin opener — *Our favourite ‘fridge’ postcard, by David Shrigley*

Worms being the usual: parental viewpoints on ‘what artists do all day’, the value (or not) of having a creative career, why life isn’t about fun, it’s about working hard, blah-di-blah-di-blah.

Anyhoo, we did have a lot of fun coming up with our manifesto for the week, and it was an excellent ice-breaker - but fair to say, the cogs of my little brain had started to turn. No surprise there…

Birthday cards, view from bedroom towards the walled garden

Roll on the first morning, it was up with the lark for a happy-birthday-to-me run down to the end of the lane to see the sheep, and back and down and back again (it wasn’t as far as I thought), followed by a bit of mindful and totally silent companionable watercolour painting while I cooled down enough for the shower, which only seemed to have ‘scalding hot’ or ‘skin flaying’ as temperature options.

And then, the first exercise, a walk in the woods.

We were staying at The Hurst, which belongs to the Arvon Foundation, and is set in 26 acres of woodland and gardens. Despite living in a supposedly ‘rural’ part of south east of England, I am still within a stone’s throw of a major airport so it takes going somewhere like The Hurst to appreciate just how rich and thick the sounds of nature are, when not overlaid with air traffic and road noise. The bird song was incredible, as we slowly walked and stopped to draw and write, up through the shade of giant sequoias that lined the track. As we approached the top of the hill, the trees opened out to reveal a view of the valley, and another valley beyond, stretching into Wales. Quite delightful.

And that’s when it all fell apart: dark marks and words began to pour out into my sketchbook, and I started to wonder how I could explain to a group of near strangers that actually I’d please like to curl up into a ball and have a complete meltdown now, thank you.

Instead, as we turned to walk back, I walked on ahead and had a little think to myself about what just happened and what I was going to do about it. I really wasn’t sure.

Luckily, the work I created from the walk had some bright flashes of colour, enough for people to say ‘pretty’ as they passed by my table. But oh my, I felt incredibly guilty. Here I was, on what was supposed to be a lovely arty retreat, creating something that was actually quite dark and emotional, instead of a delightful map of birdsong, leaves and trees. I was relieved that nobody asked me to explain it.

Can I explain it? Should I? This is something else I’ve been pondering: my propensity for sharing the minutiae of my moments, and my genuine difficulty judging where the line between private/public is.

Suffice to say, the view from the top of the hill across a Welsh valley was unnervingly familiar, and a whole slew of emotion and (obviously unprocessed) grief just boiled up out of nowhere. And it was my first birthday since and without.

Hence the inky-dark swoops and curls…

And the curled up ball of emotion…

Luckily, with our family there is always always an undercurrent of humour, even in the most dire and excruciating circumstances. At one point on my solitary walk back down the hill, I laughed out loud at a particular memory. So that’s in there, in the pink and yellow - for joy.

And it had started out so light and peaceful and full of birdsong, too!

Probably why the darkness came as such a shock to me. I’ve never had any kind of therapy or psychoanalysis, and maybe if I had I would have known that “what lies beneath” was actually a whole lot of grief and emotional turmoil? Perhaps it’s obvious. Sigmund spotted it:

The rest of the week was much less emotionally fraught, and by the time it came to bring our manifesto to ‘life’ in physical form, my mind had settled and things were starting to make sense, become clear - even more so after my tutorial with Tansy, which I deliberately scheduled for the very last afternoon. There’s oh so much intertwined in all this that I want to talk about. Again, another time.

For now, let me introduce this little character - something (someone?) that I hope communicates a little of what I believe in: fun, colour, honesty, creativity, curiosity, freedom of expression, and above all else - the joy of making.

Ball of emotions? Yes, but aren’t we all? It’s allowed.

Visible* and invisible collection of random, disparate interests, obsessions and passions? Yep! Because stuff - life - is interesting.

Reminders of childhood (spot the Lego and the Tiddlywink) and my favourite colours. Play. Dreaming. It’s allowed…

Making something that isn’t anything is the whole POINT!

She has a little box to live in, with a few other things that need finishing (as does the main disc of my walk) but my main task since coming home has been completing and submitting my tax return and getting that off my desk. Talk about coming back down to earth!

*from just outside the walled garden, looking east*

And the champagne bottles?

Ironically enough, despite choosing it as the title for this piece, “what lies beneath” was the only planned exercise we didn’t do. We walked up to the pond to consider matters, but then it started to drizzle and we decided we were content to continue working through our projects. Story has it that the pond at the Hurst (originally the home of Oscar-winning playwright John Osborne) has a thick layer of champagne bottles on the bottom, a legacy of the party days when he lived there.