A wandering creative mind

A gentle way to settle.

Welcome to my wee corner of Substack. I am a seasonal artist living on the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. I am the custodian of approximately two acres of land that includes a woodland, a meadow and my wee garden. I offer a seasonal book arts project for paid subscribers if you are interested and you can read more about that HERE. Grab a cuppa and lets delve into our relationship with the shifting seasons….

I used to have a wandering mind that sometimes struggled to settle. It could get a bit overwhelming at times as it took me in too many directions at once. I didn’t find this a comfortable state to exist within. A good few years ago I came up with a strategy to support a calmer mind and lead me, gently, down one path after another in a slow and meaningful way. I called it my incubation strategy and I draw on it each and every winter.

Incubation is different from hibernation as the latter is passive. Incubation is an active term for me and it is a place where I take myself to do some careful and directed thinking. I use the strategy for my life as a whole wandering through the different aspects and making judgements and recommendations to myself. It is particularly useful in my creative world that can easily become cluttered leaving me without a rudder in order to move forward. It is in this context that I am sharing my incubation strategy.

Creativity lies in our subconscious minds and it is, by defintion, a wandering element in our minds. When that works well we wander down meaningful pathways producing creative outcomes that raise our spirits. When it works badly it puts us into a downward spiral releasing a mass of unfinished projects that serve to affect our confidence as creators. We need to avoid this happening.

For me, incubation begins with a wander around a single piece of paper. Using a recognised simple form, such as a leaf shape, draw round some on your paper. You also might like to stick some down. Leave the drawn shapes of leaves blank for now. Using paint or coloured pens/pencils begin to explore the ‘space’ between the leaf shapes.

Let one colour grown into another. Leave some ‘gaps’ of white to calm the observing eye. When you are happy all the spaces are as your sense of colour allows for turn your attention to the spaces within the leaf outlines. Write the first words that come into your mind as you look at the colours you have created. These words are very important as they are a creative response and within them a sense of knowing will emerge. A knowing that these words developed out of a personal creative process and encounter - working with colour.

If you want to research this further you might be interested in colour therapy This school of thought associates colour with healing and breaks that process down one colour at a time. If this is new to you I recommend the book by Pauline Wills called ‘colour therapy’ as a gentle introduction.

Back to our words. I like to then ‘mine’ those words from my piece of paper and write each one out at the top of a journal page. I use each word as the impetus for a piece of writing. I always refer back to my piece of coloured paper and ask myself why each word occured to me while doing that exercise. This helps our creative thinking to wander down a meaningul pathway as it ‘means’ something to us.

These words give me my January journaling exercises and so much more. I like to think that, because they arose from colours, they are somehow connected with the world around me. I find I look for the colours on the paper in the world around me. Experience of this exercise tells me that they are out there and I have already noticed them but they are likely to be stored in my subconscious mind. Think of this exercise as building a bridge between your conscious and subconscious minds.

This is a key incubation exercise that I do as the year begins to turn. It fills me with a sense of wonder and noticing in equal measure. It provides some of the most considered journaling of the year to come. It feels very personal. I have spent the past few years developing a range of incubation exercises perfect for the darker months so that I might emerge into spring with a strong sense of where my creative work is heading. As a result of my incubation strategy, running across a good number of years, I do not have any unfinished creative projects. I do not compare my work with others. I pay homage to my self belif in colour and I am pleased with both my creative processes and outcomes. I find that remarkable. I owe it all to a well considered incubation strategy and I will be eternally grateful. I hope to share more of my wee exercises here and also in my paid Book Arts project. In that project we are currently making a wee library of small books which will be perfect for this type of creative investigations.

May I take this opportunity to wish everyone well for the year to come and beyond.

Fiona x