ART THERAPY

Most of you know that I have not been quite as mobile as I normally am during the last few months.  At the moment, I am not able to do a lot of housework - I don’t do much anyway - so my latest craze is colouring and it appears that it is the new “in thing” for adults.  I can certainly recommend it as a therapeutic exercise - I have to concentrate on what I’m doing and it is very calming.

Wherever you look there are colouring books for adults - there are so many to choose from.  Apparently, in France, they are selling faster than cook books and colouring books for adults top the Amazon bestseller list!  

I have bought myself a pack of colouring pencils from W H Smith, which are very smooth and easy to use and a book entitled “Art for Mindfulness”.  This has a quote on one side and a picture or pattern to colour on the other, and I have really enjoyed making these masterpieces.  However, my real gripe is that the book is so tightly bound that it won’t lie completely flat so that I can’t colour right up to the middle fold.  For some people, that wouldn’t matter in the slightest, but being a perfectionist, it really offends my eye to see a small strip uncoloured all down the middle.

Yesterday, however, I found the perfect solution in Waterstones - a pack of Pretty Pattern Postcards, which are excellent quality and you can see the first one that I have completed.  Now all I need to do is decide who will be the lucky recipient - I might have to draw lots!

Another thing that I am doing is importing all my Blips, photographs and journal, into DayOne, an app on my Macbook - and then I am printing them out - which is much cheaper than paying at least £100 for a bound book, and that is only for one year’s worth of Blips!  

As DayOne is a journal app, there is often a quote at the top of the page, and for one of the days, I saw this quote:

"Writers are the custodians of memory, 
and that’s what you must become 
if you want to leave some kind of record 
of your life and of the family 
you were born into." 
William Zinsser, 
“How To Write A Memoir”

I guess the same is true of artists, photographers, and even me.  Having researched our family history, I can see the need to leave some record of my life, so that hopefully, even if my grandchildren, great-grandchildren or even great-great-grandchildren don’t actually look at hard copies of my photographs or journals, they will see them on the computer and will be aware of, and perhaps understand what sort of person I was.  In fact, I have enjoyed looking back over the 930+ entries on Blip and it’s quite exciting to think that in 100 years from now my relatives will be able to look back at my photographs and journals to see what my life was like in 2015, that’s assuming that the World Wide Web and Blip is still around!

So go on, buy yourself a colouring book and some pencils and unleash your creativity - who knows, you might be famous one day - after all, Picasso and all the great artists must have started small!