That Time Art Life Journalling Changed My Life

If there's one thing I've learned in my 52 years, it's that everything is connected.

It was Mary Blue, an artist who paints the sea (sometimes using seawater, come to think of it - and that's her real name), who first showed me that a sketchbook could be something more than just a series of unfinished drawings. Mary had kept all of hers since college, even transporting them over to the UK from her homeland of the USA, so I knew they were important to her. She sketched, annotated, stuck things in and referred back to them frequently.

It was my A-Level art teacher who told me to draw every day, and showed me that progress was better than perfection.

And it was multiple generations of my female relatives who wrote diaries, kept scrapbooks and made copious notes and to-do lists. My mother worked as an infant teacher and her notebook full of scrawled lesson plans, shopping lists and craft ideas lived in the letter rack on our kitchen worktop. As a disinterested teenager, I wondered idly about why she bothered.

Fast forward 20 years and I found my answer: it was a way to balance the emotional labour that hangs over most women, most of the time, with the demands of an agile and creative mind. Preceding generations of intelligent women who share my DNA may not have had the terminology, but they still felt the pressure of doing all the thinking for a family, juggling work and caring responsibilities and trying to maintain some sort of creative or academic outlet.

And I have the evidence - not journals as such, but scattered writings evoking full lives and fertile brains: paternal grandmother's paintbox containing a 1950s exercise book of hand decorated plans for Sunday schools, flower festivals, and the etiquette classes she taught at Norwich's Assembly House. Maternal grandmother's hastily-scribbled appointment diaries headlining astonishingly busy decades of community service, family and music. My aunt, a midwife until retirement, wrote daily at her kitchen table, mingling lifelong daily personal medical notes with paper scraps bearing cooking tips, home remedies and enthusiastic reflections about her creations at pottery class.

In 2019, with my own wellbeing at an all time low, I swapped performing arts for visual art, and naturally turned to my sketchbook. Gloomy and glum as I felt then, I lacked artistic inspiration, until a quote from Glennon Doyle's book Untamed gave me a nudge: 'Look to the imagination not to escape reality, but to find it'.

I thought back to Mary's concept of what a sketchbook could be, and felt that what I needed was to gather together not only my artistic ideas as she had, but also the rest of the creative diaspora I had wandering around in my head. I needed to, quite literally, collect my thoughts.

I bought myself a delicious handmade journal bound in marbled blue and gold paper with purple linings -and some equally handsome coloured pens. All the gear and no idea? Maybe, but it got me going.

In this journal, squeezed in between work and family, I sketched and wrote and read. I made to-do lists, I copied out quotes in fancy lettering, I drew views from the car window, I doodled during boring video calls. I photographed interesting things, like the birds nest I found in the street that had a single fragile ribbon of blue party popper paper woven through it. I pondered and questioned things, drafted artist bios and grumbled about feedback from my art teacher. I cut and pasted pictures from the web, and images from books. I tested out new pencils, made notes on podcasts and tried out exercises from online tutorials. I tried to prompt myself to make time to draw every single day.

The book took around two years to fill, and during those months I spent as long reflecting on the contents as I did in creating them. I began to notice recurring themes and motifs, and I began to ask my self good questions: Why those themes? Why now? What can I do to investigate more? In answering these questions and others like them, I wrote and drew and experimented more. I began to try new things and think of different ways to interact with my art and also my own thoughts.

Creeping, but determined, dawned the realisation that change was on its way, but I didn't know what form it would take, and it all felt a bit much, so I left it alone and let life happen. A house move, and other middle-aged stuff took precedence for a while.

Beneath the surface, things were incubating.

Suddenly, it was time for action! It was high time I began to create, and my journal was full of inspiration. It had shown me I loved painting people, so (naturally) I would become a portrait artist. I tried- by golly I tried- but the conditions just weren't conducive for success in that niche.

So what else had my journal shown me? Answer: How much I value community and personal development. I set up an art club (see that story here) but I couldn't live on the money it brought in. So what else? I had teaching skills, forged over 18 years in the fires of Norfolk Museums' excellent learning team, so I began to offer art classes for beginners.

The label 'art teacher' felt more natural than 'artist', and over time, teaching art became my primary artistic practice. Gradually, joining the dots backwards to 2019, my teaching focus drifted towards the wellbeing space- my true 'ikigai'.

And of course, it was when journalling one day that I realised I could use my own transformation story as a template for other women. That's when my own patchworked style of art journalling became Art Life Journalling - my six week pathfinding course for personal growth, built on a daily prompt deck to inspire you to collect, reflect, incubate and create your way to artistic transformation.

Email or message me for more details- Art Life Journalling currently runs three times per year for small groups of six women.