This morning.

This is a collage I made this morning of my room at University. As you can see it's packed full of crap, my crap ♥, and all the walls are filled with posters, pictures and god knows what else. This is the way I like to organise myself, without it, I don't think my room would feel mine at all. I love it so.

At the moment, my favourite thing in my room is the fishing line.
It holds so many things that inspire me; My tattoo designs, quotes, prints and photographs.

Week 10.

Right, Absolutely loads to talk about for this week.

Clickey for bigger image! [opens in a new tab]


'Why not?'

This is piece was quite personal to me, I'm not going to explain what it's about, I'll let you gather for yourself.





'Future' [aka Fred]

Blog readers, this is Fred. He is a painting about fearing the future and the life ahead of ourselves. The five elements of the painting each represent a different idea... Though they might seem really obvious, there is a little more to them that you might think.

The skull - The obvious symbol of death. In this design however, I wanted it to stand for a general loss of anything in life. Fearing losing a certain feeling for example..

The Rose - Symbol of love and lust. Passion is something I hold very highly in life. My passion is my art which, if lost, I'm not sure I'd have the will to get up in the mornings and walk through my life day by day. This is something i discovered when I was really ill at the end of last year. Each day was so monotonously boring because I physically didn't have the energy to do anything even slightly creative.

The Water/Splash represents fluidity and unpredictability. Though I love spontaneity, it scares me a little to think I can't predict anything about my life in ten years; I've no idea what I'll be doing for a living or whether I'll finally settle down within myself and stop treating men like I treat my clothes.

The crows - Often a symbol of general negativity, but death and evil in particular. My soon-to-be [hopefully] tattoo of the Eye of Ra is going to represent warding off your own evils; always being true to yourself and not letting your 'inner evils' get the better of you. The crow has a similar meaning in this painting. It is fearing how your own mind can destroy itself.

The vines are a symbol of obsession and taking-over. My mind is a strange thing, it obsesses really easily over little things and doesn't like to give them up if possible. Though it can forget over time. I dread to think about how I manage my finances when I've got a decent job and I know there's money in my account. Calling myself a Shopaholic [I don't know the correct spelling of that, sorry] makes me sound stupid, but I really am addicted to buying stuff, not necessarily clothes either. And that's just one thing I can't seem to control...

I had my feedback session for my first semesters work on Monday. It went well and not so well at the same time. Jess and Tiffany [art tutors] loved 'Why not?' but hated poor ol' Fred. They said that he's too cliché and that the symbols are too obvious and leave nothing for the mind to explore... Fair point though. I see what they meant but I'm upset for poor Fred, he had to hear them put him down for 10 minutes =(.
ON the other hand, they thought 'Why not?' was brilliantly creative. Jess commented that it genuinely scared her a little due to the connotations of the wire wool [inside the cigarettes..inside the boxes] linked with the act of smoking itself. They were both really impressed with it so now all I have to do is wait for my grades to come back. Fingers crossed.


On another note, I took this photographs at Oxford station whilst waiting for my train and really liked them so I'm gunna post these too. They're only from my camera phone but they're pretty snazzy, I think.

Click on this one to see it larger ^

Serious Update. Week 9.

This week I decided my room needed more of a blog-ey feel to it. I need to be able to update my immediate surroundings a lot more frequently so I've always got my work and inspiration around me, constantly fuelling my creativity.

I put up fishing line across my room and am hanging stuff from it to look at everyday. Also just bought mini pegs for it; the large pegs were hideous. So bad in fact, I had to put the images in black and white because the pegs were nasty colours and I couldn't really be bothered to Photoshop them out...
It's really working so far though, I do constantly look at it [if only because the invisible line nearly chops my head off at least twice a day]. And I've hung things like quotes, my prints from uni and even a little bag of money. Speaking of which, I received a 'reward' the other day for finding this doctor lady's purse in the street and handing it back to her personally. Its sounds marvellously heroic but to be perfectly honest, I found her purse and its contents strewn across the pavement, roughly 300 metres from her front door so nothing amazing just made me feel good doing something genuinely... genuine. Strangely enough, I wrote 'I will do something brilliant tomorrow, I have a feeling I need it.' in my personal blog the night before. Odd.

Anyway, back to the point, here's a picture of part of my washing line of art thingy...

Serious Update. Week 8.

These are just a few pictures I while back. probably quite close to week eight of the year actually...
I really like their emotional connotations...

Week 7.

"Art Is the means by which we communicate what it feels to be alive." - Antony Gormley.
I really like this quote.


These are just something I've seen done before. Fancied portraying my own feelings into this little critters :).

Week 6.

So again, I've been pretty rubbish on updating this. Mainly because I haven't finished Fred yet.
The next three/four posts will be work I've done over the past few weeks but I'll upload them in one go.


These are various prints I've done during workshops at uni this term. No particular concept behind them, just experimenting with certain techniques.

Week 5.

So there's been a few really short entries recently, this will change soon.
I've been painting for 2 weeks ish and was hoping to post it for Week 4, but that failed....

I will, hopefully, post that up as my week 6 entry... Fingers crossed.


In the meantime, these are my babies :)




Jam and George ♥

Week 4.

So i've been mega busy this week with various things. But i did however find one beautiful morning to take this.



It is simply how i felt that morning.
Take from it what you will.

[Early] Week 3.

So, I Won't be in Reading or Oxford this week , i'll be in Wolverhampton until Saturday.
This is something i've needed for a while with all the crap running around in my head. Hopefully this getting away for a bit will put me in a better mood and help me get back into the swing of things.
Only 2 weeks or so until my second term of Uni and some serious catching up to do.

So anyway, here's my Week 3 entry early. No idea what i'll be doing all week so i'm posting early, just in case.
These are just a couple of err.... ideas, i guess :).



This is Ferny the Fern. I've never been much for pot plants and such.. generally because they die in my care. But after hearing Lynda [my aunt] explain about this fern, i had to have her :).
Ferns are really delicate, they're incredibly fussy with the conditions under which they are kept, they don't like to be touched [otherwise the leaves die off and go brown] but they don't really need looking after. She will survive on her own. Sounds familiar.
She's a piece of Art in her own right.




This is the Eye of Horus/ Eye of Ra. It's often used as a sign of protection and safety and to ward of evil.  For me, it means always being true to yourself, never letting your own evils get the best of you. Its also there to mean protection for the people closest to me.
At the moment, it is only a Henna Design on my wrist but i'm thinking i might get it tattooed.

[Belated] Week 2.

This week has been a thoughtful week. Filled with not-so-nice thoughts.
I tried to capture some of these thoughts and 'store' them somewhere away from my mind so that I didn't need to think about them anymore. I don't know whether that theory worked but here's the visual outcome anyway.





An unlit candle - If fire resembles passion, the unlit candle resembles where it once was. Loss of passion has affected me on and off, like it does anyone to be honest. But its something that got the better of me over the past few months more than it needed to. I will try harder to keep my candle lit.



Broken Glass - Shattered, in pieces. Unaffectionate. Affection is something i'm not too good at recieving. Maybe it's linked to my childhood or whatever, who knows. However it came about, it makes me feel like i'm missing something; that something needs to be pieced together.



Drugs - Something that seems to come up a lot at the moment. I've been told the plus side of drugs so many times recently that i forgot my own reasons for not doing them. I lost my own opinion in everyone else's. This is to remind me to follow life by my own rules, not everyone else's.