“I will not turn my back on the sun”

In dedication to Summer’s return and the spirit of regeneration for Planet Earth and all living beings in 2020 and beyond:

Summer’s fragrance returns once more, as pure and bright as the clear, blue sky and I celebrate its familiar beauty with EASY, FULL, NOURISHING BREATHS. I will not forget. I will not turn my back on the sun. I will keep my feet on the earth. I will raise my innocent eyes, my loving heart and my healing hands to the true vibration of this beautiful planet and I WILL NOT WALK IN FEAR.

This article is in response to a request from my lovely Linked In connection, Wendy Shellard, who asked to see more of a gift book, “A Summer Meander”, which I made for my dad’s 80th birthday. So, here is the expanded version of my recent posts on the subject. Although not a tutorial, I have added some suggestions and encouragement at the end for anyone who might feel inspired to make their own personalised gift book of memories for a loved one, focussing on the rich, sensory spectrum of shared experience.

The title, “A Summer Meander”, refers to another gift I made for my dad’s birthday a few years ago. This was a small, acrylic painting (see photo above) inspired by snapshots, taken about thirty years previously, on various summer walks - or meanders - along the coast and through the countryside of the Angus area in Scotland where I grew up. Originally, this wee painting was to be used as a starting point to develop a larger-scale, more involved, abstract version which I still intend to tackle at some point. However, here in this strangest of years, as the days grew warmer and sweeter once again, and softer breezes whispered through my inner calendar where the truly important dates are held and honoured, I felt an even stronger urgency to connect with land and family. While current restrictions postpone a physical meeting with Dad, I came up with the idea to send a gift which would allow us to go on a meander of sorts together, this time through the scenes of a handmade picture book – still touching on family memories but the content fluid enough to celebrate Summer’s timeless essence. As such, the images needed only to hint at recognisable forms and colours of fields, meadows, flowers, buildings, fences, sands, sea and sky. The materials used were mostly leftover offcuts and scraps of previous projects, and the making was done relatively swiftly with a deliberate avoidance of a perfect finish or highly worked surface. The important thing was to convey the experience of being out in the fresh air and clear light of these magical surroundings and how that felt, sounded and smelled as well as looked. How experience is always multi-faceted, over-layered, kaleidoscopic. And how those past experiences still vibrate in us and can be shared again and again, here and now. Please join us for “A Summer Meander”…. 

LIKE TO MAKE YOUR OWN GIFT BOOK OF MEMORIES?

As mentioned earlier, this article is not a tutorial but I have added some suggestions and encouragement here for anyone who might feel inspired to make their own personalised gift book of memories for a loved one, focussing on the rich, sensory spectrum of shared experience…

Pick a strong theme and be aware of your personal motivation for making a book: this will provide fuel as well as a destination point for your project. No matter how little “creative” or “artistic” ability you feel you have, your heartfelt desire to make something meaningful for your loved one WILL CARRY YOU THROUGH. Keep returning to whatever the original spark was that got you started and let the flame light your way!

Examples of memory themes:

·        special holiday/s

·        important occasion/s

·        a shared hobby or passion

·        childhood games/ comics/ treats/ songs/ clothes

·        natural environment: gardens/ favourite walks/ beauty spots, etc.

·        home life: celebrate the small, taken for granted things from the past which often become a source of nostalgia for many, such as family rituals/ habits/ shopping/ favourite recipes/ seasonal treats and events/ interior decoration

Examples of motivations:

·        To acknowledge and give special thanks to a loved one for their care, love and kindness to you

·        To acknowledge and celebrate a loved one’s special talent or skill, perhaps something that has “faded from view” for some time or just never had a light shone on it because the person was so busy taking care of others and/ or is a modest, self-effacing character

·        Not to forget/ be forgotten: not to forget the good times, the good people, the good ways

·        To celebrate a reunion with family/ friends/ colleagues: share common ties and struggles and reinforce supportive bonds

·        To give comfort/ relief to someone suffering or recovering from ill health/ restricted mobility/ confinement

·        To aid memory retrieval and communication impairments

·        To honour those passed on and help those left behind to process grief

·        To process your own difficulties and celebrate your strengths – in this case, the gift book is for your dear self

Getting going: This project is not about making “A Great Work of Art” so keep it simple and stick to your chosen theme and intention to avoid disappointment. It can be very helpful if you have some old photographs for reference and inspiration but you will still be relying mostly on tuning into your own experience through sensory awareness to breathe life into your pages.

The easiest option is to buy a blank, hardback notebook or sketchbook to fill with your memories but if you want to try binding your own book, choose something fairly sturdy like thick cartridge paper or craft card for the pages (I repurposed used blotting sheets from my printmaking work) and boards such as mounting-card weight for the covers.

Click on this link and follow the instructions for making two simple but very effective bookbinding methods.

Gather simple, humble materials such as paper and card offcuts of different weights, shades and textures which could be used envelopes and packaging, and add in a few special textured surfaces such as fabric and yarn scraps and natural materials. Set out some standard, water-based paints (a child’s set of poster paints/ acrylics will do perfectly well) and use an old plate, tile or tray as a palette. Add some coloured and graded drawing pencils, paintbrushes, sponges, rags, glue, scissors and a jar of water. Again, keep it simple!

You can paste pictures and words torn or cut from magazines if you feel the need to reference your chosen memory theme more precisely but try to bring your unique expression through your own hands to the work here and there as these are an extension of your heart centre, only too eager to express your love and care if you can keep your doubts out of the way!

Remember to make use of all of your senses in sourcing, describing and celebrating memories. Never underestimate your ability to convey smell, sound, touch or movement through uncomplicated painted and drawn gestures. Simple, repeated lines of pencil dots or dashes following the beat of a favourite song will bring rhythm to the page and the spirit of the music with it. Pay attention to how your paintbrush also replicates the sound and movement of those swaying grasses in that childhood secret garden as you sweep across the surface. Now notice how a sweet fragrance seems to drift up from the paper as you match the perfect shade of green from your paint palette with your scent recall. If there is a need to draw a recognisable form, such as a house or a football, and you still lack confidence in your ability, think in terms of an “emoji” and how effective these simplified little pictures and symbols are! Keep it simple…

Sensory Awareness: Most of all, be aware that SENSORY EXPERIENCE IS FLUID AND INTERCHANGEABLE IN ITS NATURE. In other words, don’t get bogged down trying to recall or describe a sound if that’s not working – try another sense instead and see if that helps with the process. If you have neglected this awareness it may take a bit of patience to bring it to the fore but it will return if you keep it light and playful!

Examples of sensory experience from “A Summer Meander” (I have left out the sense of taste here but added “Movement” or kinetic sense instead which does not qualify as one of the traditional “five senses” - there are other senses further beyond this but that’s for another article!)

·        Sight: shifting viewpoints, e.g. repeating streaks of turquoise, blue and navy – these reappear throughout the book as hints of the ever present sea and sky on a coastal walk, even when only flitting in and out of your vision. They can appear anywhere on the page because the images are a reflection of my inner experience of the walk, not a photographic replication of the scene. Imagine how features change in a landscape as you pass by, how things come in and out of view: the top of a building only glimpsed from behind vegetation then seen as a whole for a time, perhaps noticed again from a different angle on the way back home/ bright patches of grass and flowers glowing from between the bars of a huge gate close by then later on in your walk, that same gate seen from another viewpoint, shrunk down to a tiny matchstick form, gradually swallowed up by the lush, green landscape. Your memory holds all of these viewpoints so you can drop any or all of them onto the picture surface, mix them up, make a patchwork of it all. Cut and tear shapes, shuffle things around, see what feels harmonious. One or two recognisable forms such as a gate or chimney can be helpful to anchor your intention but don’t get caught up with describing these in detail.

·        Smell: using your sense of smell to retrieve and describe memories, e.g. the most important or dominant sense for me throughout my book is the sense of smell – I feel that I can breathe in the scent of fresh, summer air drifting up from the pages. This also imparts to me a strong feeling of freedom and space. The sense of smell is a very powerful memory trigger – I encourage you to make full use of it and discover for yourself how much of your experience is processed through this often underestimated sense. As I stressed before, as sensory experience is fluid and interchangeable, the smell sense can be used to match just that right shade, shape, texture or gesture for translating your memory into your image – let it guide your work.

·        Sound: using your sense of hearing to retrieve and describe memories, e.g. subtle sounds such as rustling grass and leaves, gentle waves at the shore or birdsong. These are all in my book and I can hear them when I look through the pages – not literally, of course, but in that interchangeable, sensory way I have tried to highlight for you in this article. Natural sounds and music are hugely important to my well-being and they also help me process my experience in the world. As a child who was very late to find speech and as an adult who struggles to this day to speak easily, naturally and fluently, I had to teach myself about incoming and outgoing sound, the effects of different sound qualities, the root of sound production (or lack of it) and its process through the body and finally, to reach for that cord/ chord that binds it all together and gifts us authentic expression – and connection. Sound is vibration, active in the present moment – harness your awareness of its effect in your life and strike that right chord with your treasured memories to bring them alive here and now.

·        Touch: texture used to bring a tactile sense to the page, e.g. describing worn building materials such as rusty, corrugated iron, crumbling stone and brick, splintered and dried-out fence posts, peeling paint, etc. The most detailed part of my book are the pages showing a dense patchwork of building forms – this was deliberate as my dad and I particularly relish the textures and tones of these old farm outhouses. All the same, the details are kept fairly simple and this is helped along by the use of scraps of corrugated card and even some slivers of real tree bark. Elsewhere in the book are fragments of handmade paper which were made using plants from my mum’s garden in the past. Again, a little goes a long way – these additions are just to hint at the “real” thing. You might enjoy the process of gathering scraps of different textured materials and find how effective (and time-saving!) these can be in matching your memory detail.

·        Movement: sensing nature’s dance, e.g. grasses swaying, flower heads bobbing and stretching up to the light, birds swooping or water flowing, conveyed through simple gestures in paint: for me, this always overlaps with rhythm so I’d suggest really feeling into a memory scene and get that repeating sequence of swaying, bobbing or swooping through your body. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to enact the movement! Someone with restricted mobility can still access and benefit from activating their kinetic memory. Let your hands bring forth the essence of this rhythm to the page in as direct way as possible. Again, it’s not about describing the scene in detail, it’s getting an impression of lightness, of freedom, etc. I also used a feather imprint and fragments of fine muslin, frayed and eased into flowing shapes to suggest bird flight/ sea drift/ cloud streaking.

Some practical considerations:

·        Dimensions, completed weight and overall format including binding: e.g. perhaps a larger format for someone with sight impairment; be aware of the book’s bulk and weight (this increases with the accumulation of pasted card and paper as you work on it!) if transporting in person or sending through the post – this may also impact on its handling by an elderly/ frail person; test whether the book format allows for easy page-turning if making for someone with impaired manual dexterity/ strength

·        Paint and glue drying times in relation to deadline! Make sure you leave enough time for layers of paint and glue to dry thoroughly before going on to the next stage. You might need to weight pages to flatten also.

Finally, go easy on yourself - working with memory recall and sensory processing can use up a lot of energy! Generally, this is an enjoyable process but we all have our negative experiences in life and these may surface from time to time. This in itself can be a great opportunity for healing but use your own "common SENSE " to pace yourself and know when to give yourself a break. Good luck!

Michelle Duke, 23rd. July 2020