17 Jun Wednesday…with Taking a Moment in Time

When I was growing up, my parents gave me two very different takes on the world; Dad was annoyingly straight forward and very logical and Mum was much more likely to go with the flow and get distracted…we would often end up just driving around looking at things with Mum, whereas Dad had to arrive at points and places at very specific times, almost to the second! Mum was slow and tolerant, Dad was fast and impatient…

But they were both entrepreneurs; my mum wrote children’s cookery books, appeared on early TV cookery programmes, ran our hotel, a catering business, a business making sweets and later on selling ’things in tins’ for company give-aways; Dad set up businesses selling electrical components and later on batteries.

But as it always goes, I was determined not to be like my dad who didn’t seem at all interested in aesthetics or stopping to look at details…I wanted to look at things a lot ( including his brightly coloured reels of wire and strange stripy valves which he was always telling me to put down…)

But as I’ve grown older and had to find a way to make a living from an aesthetic based career, I’ve found that my dad’s straight-forward logic combined with my mum’s love for things and getting distracted is basically how I’ve survived…and now I actually love that I can identify what they’ve both given to me…

So when I met Natasha from Taking a Moment in Time and she told me how passionately she wanted to help people work out a way to earn a living from their own creativity, I understood how important that is…some people have amazing artistic skills, but they don’t have the business brain. Their creativity is all important, but it becomes hard to pay the bills unless you can learn even a little bit of business acumen, and that’s where Natasha comes in…

I wish I had had the opportunity earlier on to have the input from a creative business mind…someone who I knew would understand where I was coming from and yet someone who could push me out of my comfort zone.

I have been working at surviving as an artist for years now, and it would have been nice to be able to confidently fast track some of my ideas in the early days…

Anyway, suffice to say I was so pleased to be able to collaborate with her on a shoot for her website where you’ll be able to find details of workshops and one to ones…

Natasha had a very strong sense of the colours she wanted to use as well as natural textures…I enjoy collecting a palette of ‘things’ before I start so that I have a clear idea of what to work with and not get distracted by looking for things when I’m taking the photos…Browns, purples and blues were important as well as some sort of book…books always give the feeling of a warm human, un-intrusive presence which most people can relate to…However my ordered logic was slightly interrupted by the distraction of this big brown book…apparently it contains 10,000 things every child should know, and I just like opening it at random to see what vintage wisdom it has to offer……and weirdly today it opened at ‘Marvels of Instantaneous Photography’! I look at this and find it extraordinary to see how far we’ve come in such a short space of time with photography…imagine showing an iPhone to these two!

I closed the book and thought that it was actually too large to be a prop for these photos, and moved on to the succulents…I love how they have blue and purple bloom on their leaves, and somehow they feel very calming…I also collected purples…

…and started arranging: I always start with more, and end up taking things away to reveal the compositions

tiny tweaks and different angles always alter the personality of the composition in an almost imperceptible way…

( I always enjoyed the ‘Spot the Difference’ pages in Christmas Annuals…the pictures below are all ever so slightly different…)

When I was using the purples, I had added an old bible which had belonged to my Great Grandmother, and when I took out one of the books inside, an old photo of my Granny dressed up as a fairy fell out…

…along with a love poem my Great Grandmother Mabel ( or ‘Mab’ as she had signed it ) had written to my Great Grandfather…

…but I also wondered why it had been in her bible; it was a poem which alluded to getting through hard times, and I couldn’t help wondering if they did, or if she had just kept it without giving it to him, or maybe even taken it back and kept it after he’d died…I also thought it was sweet that my Granny had wanted to keep a touching note from her parents…and now here I was doing the same

I was suddenly reminded of my Mum’s ways of getting completely distracted, and how I should employ my Dad’s practical ways of getting the job done…but then it also came to mind that these photos were for a site called ‘Taking A Moment in Time’…which is basically just what I’d done.

There are more details about Natasha’s workshops here and you can visit her blog here and  follow her on Instagram here .

And there is also a Steller Story version here