And so, a new chapter begins. Well, just a blog post, thankfully not long enough to require chapters! I have been thinking about this route for a while now, working through a few background issues and have reached the point where not actually getting started, regardless of how imperfect I may feel the preparation is, would be more irritating than feeling like a clown. After all, Clown School is comically expensive so why not do it all for free?

One of my greatest ongoing challenges is best labeled shyness really, approaching people for anything is brain numbing much of the time - don’t think it's a lack of confidence, or self value, but regardless, it IS. So the coaching concept I want to apply to myself this time, is just doing something as a starting point, rather than nothing at all. Time to lay the first stone, and begin the journey of discovering what the house might eventually look like. Every little stone cemented into the ground is one minute less we’ll be camping out in a caravan without running water till the whole shebang is over! How good is good enough? In this case, words on a file, with a photo, on the blog, is enough to tick all my own boxes. Sure, not good at approaching people, but very good at communicating ideas and after all, in any relationship, your own part is to bring yourself rather than to control what the other parties make of that. I may not, and you may not for that matter, be good at leading the horse to water BUT we can all fill up the water trough so that when the horses find their way there, AND they choose to drink, they will not go away thirsty.

My intention is life is to make interesting art that has meaning and value to me and to work with other creative people, using the professional coaching and communication skills I have learned over many years, to enrich their own creative experiences. I am absolutely convinced that the energy and imagination that creative people have, can be focussed into amazing work and life experiences, both for you and for me. I have been thrilled to find out that this is indeed the case in real life too! I find myself so enormously motivated by the creative growth of others, especially when there is an opportunity to enhance that by any skills or knowledge I may be able to contribute. Starting to sound like some kind of advertising psychobabble here, but it is exciting to see creative people thrive!

I am intending to publish here once a week, writing about some form of coaching idea I have found useful or heard about, plus showing and talking about a particular artwork of my own. I rather like images that leave the viewer to their own interpretation, but on the other hand, by revealing slightly more about why you did something and what it meant, you can perhaps find a point of connection with others more quickly. A very knowledgable friend and creative wunderkind told me that the most successful day to publish a blog is on Saturday, so that is something to aim for but ultimately at this point, for me its about the thinking, the writing, and the satisfaction of actually pressing publish so if that happens on Friday, Sunday or Wednesday morning, the horses can find their top up then!

The image attached today is from a series of photomontage works, which I called “Das Strandgut”, which as I understand it may be interpreted as the Waif, or the Flotsam. This series blend images from my childhood in Australia, in the red centre and on the beaches of the coast, with images from my first months here in Germany. This period was one of enormous adjustment, and I did indeed feel somewhat like a waif who had washed up out of a shipwreck! In this way, they are a helpful memoir of that period, but at the time were a way of imposing myself and my past onto the local landscape, and feeling some kind of control over things by choosing how the images fitted together, and how they (and I) might blend well in texture and content. Please ignore the "hotpants on a dragster" look, it would have been 'snazzy' back then, but not so much now...

Well, I do bang on a bit, don’t I! On with the circus, clowns, hotpants, and horses and everything.