LandFillHarmonic orchestra - creativity at it's best

This is a must watch video about orchestra instruments being made form recycled trash in a slum in Paraguay. Inspiring stuff.

Landfill Harmonic 

Enjoy!

Swimming in the current

These little fish are swimming in the current and letting it carry them - the prayer on these flags is along this theme.

Heart prayer Flags

These are my Heart prayer flags - the prayer on them is - Let our hearts shine out to the world like little beacons, welcoming love and dissolving fear. Let our hearts join as one, that we may harness this power in unity.

Yummy Prayer Flags

Hand painting Prayer Flags has been my primary activity lately. I painted a parrot holding a string of flags made from material scraps and a little clay love heart that I had made and decided to use this as a logo.Then I have been painting flags, sewing them and painting prayers on them.

Letting Go

Letting Go has been one of the quickest paintings to emerge off the canvas that I have ever done. Mind you the last few weeks leading up to this painting, I have moved through some of the quickest letting go of deep emotional wounds that I have ever experienced, so I am not sure why I am suprised ha ha ha. I am loving working with these Hydrocryl paints - sooo saturated and yummy. The Golden brand liquid paints are also a dream to work with. I painted for about 10 hours yesterday, with a few breaks here and there and then added a few final touches this morning.

Heart Tree

Just finished Heart Tree. I added some deeper purple to the surrounding background to make the falling hearts pop a little more and coloured some of the surrounding whites at the bottom of the tree, to give more light at the top. Such a different painting now with only those few changes. The photographs just don't do it justice - needs to be seen in person : ))

Heart Tree

Heart Tree has been a lot of fun to do - still not finished  - soon I hope to get back to it. I just love working on such BIG canvases : ))

The Value of Resting

Yesterday I was feeling unwell and my body was definitely asking for a rest. I listened, rested and nurtured myself  -  and today my body is getting rid of all the unwanted gunk : )) Yay! It got me thinking this morning about rest and how incredibly intelligent our bodies are. How, given the chance, our bodies ( minds and spirits too) can recuperate . I started wondering why it is so hard for me and so many others in our culture to just simply rest. I usually only rest when it is enforced by becoming unwell. Sound familiar? I was reminded of one of my favourite bits from Leunig's book, The Curly Pyjama Letters  - "What is worth doing and what is worth having?" asks Vasco of his friend Mr. Curly. " It is worth doing nothing and it is worth having a rest" advises the sagacious Mr Curly. " In spite of all the difficulty it may cause, you MUST rest Vasco - otherwise you will become RESTLESS". How true! When I look around at others and when I feel my own self - there is this constant rest-less-ness - I've noticed it seems to increase, initially, when I am TRYING to rest ( me thinks that is resistance to resting). Not surprising when adverts, like the one for cold and flu tablets telling us to "soldier on", are in our faces. When we are faced with friends, family, work colleagues and all the other 'Restless' people we encounter - giving us and themselves pats on the back for ignoring or pushing through anything that looks or even sniffs of rest. It seems to be perceived as weakness, laziness, valueless and definitely detrimental to the smooth running of production and the business of making money. After all, there are deadlines and clients waiting and and and and and................I think I'm gonna go out on a limb here with Mr Curly and suggest that it's possible that taking a little rest every now and then might be very efficacious to our bodies, minds and spirits. There is the possibility that it may prevent us from getting unwell and having an enforced rest but it may also be the the place where creative ideas and solutions bubble up to the surface - because we ARE taking time out. Time away from the cacophony of busy life, where we can actually hear the quiet voice inside ourselves and have the time to listen. This begs the question of what is the definition of rest? Most peoples eyes glaze over when they even hear the word REST mentioned. I would imagine each person may have a different answer. For some, it may be sitting on a garden swing in the sunshine staring off into space and eventually falling asleep, for others it may be knitting while listening to their favourite music, for others still, it may be reading a yummy book and sitting, pondering after every paragraph or sitting on the beach listening to the waves crashing and the gulls overhead. Whatever 'rest' is for you - consider taking some NOW and enjoying the many benefits it has to offer. On that note, I think I will rug up against the crisp wind and find a spot of sunshine to curl up and rest in : ))

Devine has just gone up on my FB business page facebook.com/ShonaHutchings with the other finished paintings I have for sale. It was simply a daisy chain of hearts on canvas with a few of my favourite colours - blues, turquoise and red and gold. I left it on the easel for some weeks as it didn't feel finished. There was a place in the centre that kept calling to me but I just couldn't quite hear it - like this elusive sound just at the periphery of my awareness. Last week a friend came over for a couple of hours so we could paint together and listening to some music and working on another canvas - I suddenly got the impulse to work on this one again. The woman's face then materialised really quickly on the canvas and I added some other details and changed a few colours. Still she wasn't finished. Then on a trip with my husband to a warehouse he had to go to for his work, I was introduced to Hydrocryl, artists acrylic paints, in these little glass tubs. The guy said they had ordered them in, in quantities, to sell to big companies and the orders fell through after the first one. They had lots of paints and some were drying up because their shelf life was coming to an end. He sold 3 good ones to me - the most saturated colours I have seen in acrylics. I was in love - Ultra violet, Pthalo green and Alizarin were my three choices. My husband raided their wheelie bin for the ones that had been thrown out already and I have been through them and added water to see if it revives any. They are called Interference or translucent colours, which I don't use as much. Anyway, I digress. I carried my bootie home - excited and eager to try them on canvas. When I walked in to the room I paint in, the woman on the canvas said " Yes, I want those colours on me". A week later and I still have the purple under my finger nails . The colours are so deep and rich and I love them even if they are really difficult to clean off skin, never mind nails - a small price to pay for how absolutely divine they are - There we have the name for the painting - but I changed the i to an e, so it is more like a name for her : )) Deeeeeevine : ))

Welcome to My World is a fun painting for me. It's really so cartoonish and just evolved from a sort of dream like city scape into a lets jump out of our cars and dance in the street just for the pure joy of it - Now that's the kind of world I envision - it's started already, the movement grows stronger every day and I would much rather dance than drive anyday : ))

Cherish is a painting that I recently finished. I challenged myself to paint with only a variety of browns and one cream. Before hand, I had walked around my neighbourhood and taken photo's of lots of objects with brown in them and then came home and mixed different shades of brown. I added Gold at the end also, Just can't help myself. The word Cherish just came into my mind and seemed a bit odd but I painted it anyway - I didn't really like the browns while I was painting - I tend to veer away from mud colours.   I realised from my walk that all the brown things I photographed were quite beautiful and somewhere in the middle of this little exercise,  my perception of brown started to change - This is not one of my favourite paintings but it was a really interesting process and I did become quite fond of one of the darker shades of brown by the end of it : ))

Joy Constellation. The day after I finished this painting, I turned on the TV and there was a documentary on about the planets and this team of people who sent up a little robot that took some amazingly beautiful pictures of Saturn and it's rings and it's 60 something moons - I just sat mesmerised by the beauty of it all and in awe of the technology that allows them to do that. They had close up photos of Triton, which has rivers and lakes of liquid methane that flow over it like water and cause similar patterns in the surface of the planet, like we have on Earth. I'm so happy that I can travel there in my imagination and the thought that who I am holds all of that and more just blows my mind out of the water.

My new Joy and Love Journal was a pleasure to make out of scrap material and wool and ribbon. I will be recording things I love to do and journaling about How I want to feel  - when I wake up, when I look at my bank account, when I talk about my work. You get the picture! This is all part of another e-course I'm doing called Do What You Love. Just honing my ability to focus on what I want to do every day that lights me up and makes Joy a daily reality.

A little nonsense poem which just had to come out!! 

Lime green Lush Devines

Shining furls of Lush Devine, rubbing up and down my spine

sqiggles dancing through the maze and hopping grandly, smiles ablaze

One who enters here will find jumping doodles, skipping chimes,squelchy layers of bubble slime - green and gorgeous, soft and lime, pulsing globules, all in time. Add a little rose vermouth and watch it spread and grow from Truth, dancing bluebells singing songs, tiny fluff birds in their throngs.

Now a little word of warning - once ingested, burps start forming, big and gaseous, fragrant too and when they burst out from your mouth, they'll make you laugh and turn to goo!

Have a great day Shona <3 <3 

The paintings Connection and Listen to My Heart Song are two of my latest works. Sometimes we feel disconnected from each other and ourselves and I find in my own experience that it just takes one little thing to reconnect us to ourselves and each other - one moment in time and everything can be and is being transformed. Listen to my heart song was a canvas that had many layers and was alot of fun to start with. At some point I came to a standstill and so I put it aside for a time and came back to it recently and it just came together really quickly. Again, it's two people and this time I felt to write words on the canvas too.

Unravelling

Wow it's been a huge week for me. Haven't had much time for posting. Painting Yes, and I have been trying to figure out how to find a sustainable way to do that. I seem to go into an absolute zone when I paint and am up till the wee hours of the morn, then I crash and need to recover. I was having a chat with my husband about it and we both agreed that during the day I feel I need to attend to my 'responsibilities' and so night time feels like the only time I can paint without distractions around my other roles. He suggested I address that by putting a message on my phone saying I'm painting ( and that I equate that with working) and take my painting more seriously ( mindset rather than attitude). Then I could sleep when I need it . I like this idea and have decided to try it and see how I go. I just posted a new canvas that I  finished titled Reaching for the Light. It has been through many phases and layers, bit like me, and then morphed into it's present composition. I kinda love that her bottom looks like another fruit. She was a leaf a few days ago. Change is inevitable and keeps life interesting and juicey - I was suprised and then I thought 'oh well why not!'

Latest canvas hot off the easel

After a couple of weeks of a very emotional journey on canvas, I have just finished a painting, simply titled Sunflower. It has morphed from a quite sterile looking sunflower on plainish background to layers of colour that then became muddy and rather ugly to look at. Much stifled energy and shoulds and shouldn't later, I finally had a breakthrough this morning, after a Network spinal appointment last night freed me up. After alot of laughing at myself and a great yoga session in the cool breeze of my back yard, I painted all morning and feel finally sated. This course with Flora is amazing and I can highly recommend it to everyone looking to reconnect with themselves and their creativity.

E- course causes explosion

The title sounds like a news headline and so it might be!! Just a week into an e-course online with Portland artist, Flora Bowley and I am exploding with creative energy. Not getting much sleep and thoroughly enjoying myself. Not sure if this is legal - having sooooo much fun!

Australia Day Fun

It was 42 degrees on Australia Day and so I thought there was no better way of spending it than painting in air conditioned comfort. I must have been influenced by the Chinese New Year as I painted 4 small canvases, three of which were cherry blossom themed and one with golden yellow weeping trees.

Cherry Blossom Muse is one of my favourites and the blossom trees were a combination of day and night perspectives. I had alot of fun with using objects and sponges as well as my fingers and paint brushes to create these 4 paintings.

Tree Spirit woman painting

I went for a ride down near the Lake and as I was riding I caught glimpses of a peacock feather cape hanging down from a tree. I came home and painted Tree Spirit Woman.

Artspace

While I was painting Mountain Moon Rising, I started off in a very different direction than where I ended up. It is so enjoyable when a painting takes me on it's own journey and leaves me rested, rejuvenated and with a quiet, happy feeling inside. I sometimes start off with a low level anxiety inside and some anxiousness about what I will create. As the process progresses there is a release that happens and I go into a more intuitive and relaxed place where the painting happens and I just go on the journey. So much more enjoyable than I first anticipate, that I am always mildly suprised.