Busy, busy summer….and resting

Although I have been meaning to write a blog post for a while I have had multiple things consuming my time as well as needing a good rest over the summer holidays.

One of the main benefits of being a teacher is the long summer holiday and this year I managed five and a half weeks away from work apart from two days of workshop bang slap in the middle!

I started the holiday recovering from a virus, so I switched off and rested fully. One of the main disadvantages of teaching (relentless 14 week terms with no break) is that by the time July comes around your battery seriously needs to be recharged and two years in a row now I have had viruses on the last week of term/beginning of the holiday. I think that is fairly typical. In a school term (I don’t teach in schools) you get a break midway through the term. In my ‘half term’ I work through two days a week and run workshops on the other days for another provider. I only get Xmas, Easter and Summer breaks but with the last two I usually run workshops. Only Xmas is a non-teaching rest and I am usually doing plans for the next term.

Alongside that and juggling several employers I also manage my art practice and all that involves – which as all artists know, is MANY different things and often the last of these is actually creating art! None of this is a complaint at all but it is all-consuming. My corporate background as a Project Manager & Programme Manager come in very handy.

However, this summer I managed to:

Revisit old sketchbooks and continue two series from several years ago

Create 5 more paintings of one of these series

Make a triptych of the other

Continue my wave painting series

Took part in 3 exhibitions over the whole summer (one of which was in the holiday)

Ran 2 workshops

Attended 2 exhibition private views

Did a CPD course that will help my practice and art business

Applied for another exhibition

Set up my website www.luminaart.co.uk

Prepped classes for September

Rested when I could and read 2 books

Spent time sprucing up the garden AKA the outside studio 😊

So, pretty busy but still felt like I had a good rest. It was a fab break and I enjoyed the sunshine as often as I could. I certainly felt like my battery was fully charged on week 1 back at teaching and I had a post-break glow.

It always feels good to have time to think about my practice, read and do courses that inspire me to dig deeper, as well as potter, marinate ideas, use my sketchbook and journal and develop new ideas or re-visit old ones that still have mileage.

This is one of the images from my surreal collage series that I developed over the summer. It is called ‘Leap’. Enjoy.