Finding resilience: #100oceanblues
I’m a huge fan of Michael Beirut and his philosophy around the 100 day projects.
Beginning Thursday, October 21, 2010, do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day. Do it every day between today and up to and including Friday, January 28, 2011, the last day of the project, by which time you will have done the operation one hundred times. That afternoon, each student will have up to 15 minutes to present his or her one-hundred part project to the class.
The only restrictions on the operation you choose is that it must be repeated in some form every day, and that every iteration must be documented for eventual presentation. The medium is open, as is the final form of the presentation on the 100th day. — Michael Beirut
I’ve completed 6 at a rate of about 2 a year and I wrote about the first one a few years ago here.
The 100 day practice requires huge discipline and focus. It’s not easy on the days when you’ve got up early worked all day and it’s late and you’re tired. After the initial drag of sitting down to it on those days, I notice that it’s actually the best thing I’ve done all day and usually exactly what I needed.
Expressing myself creatively gives me back to myself. All the bullshit falls away, all the masks I think I’m not wearing, all the worry, all the little things that I think mattered…it doesn’t matter when I’m making.
As a creative in a fast paced software company, it’s easy to lose myself in being a design manager which doesn’t tap into this aspect of who I am. My work is creative but I need rationale for it, I analyse to get it right, I framework myself out of problems and I workshop my way to success with my team.
You can’t workshop your way to honest open creativity. You can’t framework your way out of feeling creatively stuck. You can’t analyse all the data to find a way around. Art requires a different way of thinking through feeling, sensing and emotion. There isn’t rationale for most of the things I do. The purpose is to create. The more I plan and think, the more forced the work feels. Letting go and moving paint around a canvas because it feels good and I like the colours is the best way forwards.
The world is moving fast and changing quickly as technology alters our societies, cultures and landscapes. Art is needed like never before to reconnect people to themselves and to each other in an authentic way. Inspiring people to find stillness, return to nature, and find their own courage is something that moves me. I can only do that if I go there myself, so it is an invitation to visit that place in you too.
The last series I completed in 2017 is called #100oceanblues. This series is about resilience. In every piece there is a small tree growing anyway, or a small home with someone living there despite the happy rage of the ocean, despite the uncontrollable nature of its energy. There is something entirely beautiful about things that survive anyway despite all odds.
Celebrating the ocean with #100oceanblues a series all blue and alive 🌊
Watch out for my next 100 day project exploring moments of ocean, snapshots of that feeling of freedom you get in the waves.
