Lalla

Such interesting posts, I'm so glad I started this! And looking back over what I wrote, how interesting it is, isn't it, that one can put ideas down that, retrospectively, seem completely to miss what one really wanted to say! Reading all the comments I can see, I think, why I wrote what I wrote - I wanted to see what others thought, more than I wanted to analyse what I think myself; because reading through everything you've all written, I find myself saying "YES! Exactly!" so often. What has really become clearer to me is how lucky we are, we who combine art and craft. Because we always do have so much to learn, which can always feed our creativity, as so many of you have pointed out. When we struggle to be creative we can still enjoy our work by turning to learning. Learning is always such a thrill, like learning more vocabulary in a foreign language, to be able to communicate something different. And fun to experiment and break rules, to find ways, using the vocabulary analogy, to say something interesting with those newly acquired words. It's such a huge subject, isn't it. As for messy work spaces, has anyone seen a wonderful little book called "7, Reece Mews"; it's a collection of photographs of the painter Francis Bacon's studio. Bacon was said to find his images, his ideas, out of the chaos around him; he couldn't work otherwise. And it really does look completely chaotic. I'm the opposite, I like to 'clear the decks' between projects, to create clear spaces so my visual field isn't cluttered with all sorts of extraneous 'noise'. How wonderful are our differences and the things we share.