Art and Creativity: When it Gets HOT, the Hot Go to the Beach!

Part of the joy of having my creative space where I do is that it faces the "daylight side" of the house, and there are windows on two sides. This makes for excellent natural light when I work, and for when I need to take product photos for online sales listing.

The drawback is that we're currently having a heatwave here, and my creative space is therefore the hottest room in the house.

Our local beach

Since we live in a house without air conditioning, the room is basically unusable at the moment... there's no amount of meditation and "putting myself in the right frame of mind" that can help me concentrate on detail work when my surroundings are around 90 degrees (30 degrees C) or higher.

At times like these, I either turn to writing... or I go looking for "raw materials," AKA beach stones that are flat and smooth enough that they are suitable for painting. Our local beach is less than a 200 yard walk from here.

Simply from looking at the picture above and to the right, you'd think that finding stones would be "a walk in the park," right?

Actually, it's not.

The vast majority of stones on any given beach are rough, uneven, chipped, cracked, shaped oddly or in some way immediately not suitable.

But even the ones that look suitable often turn out not to be.

If you have ever looked at the surface of stones under a magnifying glass, you'll discover that they tend to be filled with tiny pockmarks, crystals, fissures and such.

Therefore — because paint it liquid and liquids always seek the path of least resitance on any surface — as soon as you apply paint, you immediately get spectacular "feathering" and blobbing because the stone is simply not able to "hold" a crisp line, which is an absolute requirement when you are trying to create a design like the one below:

A recent finished design. The stone is about 2 1/4" (57mm) across.

Simply finding stones can be a nice meditation, in and of itself! I have to be in the right mindstate in order to find what I am looking for.

After years and years of doing this, I have reached a point where I wait for a certain patch of stones to "talk" to me. I suppose it's really just intuition combined with an educated guess as to where waves and current will deposit the flattest stones.

I can't explain why that works, but I know that my "hit rate" is much higher than when I just sit down in a random spot and look for stones.

I didn't stay out for long, mostly because all the stones on the beach had already been baked for several hours, and there was absolutely no breeze off the water... which is what cools things down.

About 25 minutes out there yielded five paintable stones... really not very impressive, but at least it was a nice diversion!

So I have come home and have started writing, instead. I am feeling determined to put more effort into "journaling" this creative experience, as part of just putting more effort into the social media end of creativity.

As I have said on numerous occasions previously, at least part of my objective here is also to sell some of these painted stones, and that means putting effort into self-marketing... which is — and always has been — possibly my least favorite thing to do, pretty much tied with "accounting and bookkeeping."

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and sharing a bit more in my creative endeavors!

Because I am trying to make some semblance of income — a part time living, even — I now add this footer to all my posts, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might decide to take a further look at my work, and perhaps consider supporting independent art.

Thank you, in advance, for your consideration and support!

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2021.06.27 AS-TXT-057/023