Rain in Venice

 Four days of incessant rain

Rain in Venice; photo Hal Rumney Hunt


It was two weekends back, in fact the weekend of the changing of the light, although you would have never have guessed it. For weeks beforehand I had imagined sunny skies, and Italian weather forecasts promised just that, but instead.........it rained......and rained

 When I was a kid I had a sort of conceptual dyslexia. I must confess that I have never ever heard of such a condition but I had it, have it still sometimes. Examples.You can't have your cake and eat it' my mother would say. And I would look at a piece of cake and eat it at the same time and just didn't get it. and 'Save your pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' lost completely there. Riddles were beyond me so I guess I sunk myself instead into the mystery of imagery instead as a way of confirming my frail existence

Oh, and worst of all 'It never rains but it pours' that threw me too.

Still does.

So, two weekends back I ran a workshop in Venice entitled Photography and the Creative Mind' Yes, it was about exploring simultaneously the labyrinths of this wondrous City and the labyrinths of the human creative mind. Heady stuff you might say and I'd get the joke.
I watched the weather forecast daily during the week beforehand and what was promised as a 'sunny weekend' went from 'occasional shower's to 'heavy intermittent showers', to 'overcast with rain and occasional sunshine' And neither of these eventuated. Ok, it's true, if you know anything about Italian weather forecasts, you'd know they are Ceaușescusque. And the whole weekend turned out to be what Californians call a weather bomb. 96 hours of not stop rain. In other words it rained and it poured (with rain).

A disaster you might think, but not so. The fact was that the City was practically washed clean of tourists, and it glistened. The light was a pure photographer's light and our night time photography ventures produced some remarkable images. So, I might dare to say that  'Every cloud has a silver lining' (and I think that means that there is always something good to find even in the midst of a seeming disaster).
Does it?

So I was happy with the weekend and encouraged by the way the participants worked on their imagery (they all brought their laptops) and whenever we returned to base, they shared their work and encouraged each other. And this is why am including photography in our next workshop in May in Assisi, combining it with painting and poetry to see what happens. And want happens, you know, is always unpredictable and thank heavens for that.

This workshop, by the way is entitled 'The Tango of Creativity'

An unusual title for a somewhat unusual workshop.

We ran our first one last summer is Assisi, Italy, where Michelle Rumney and I organised an explorative weekend in image making, one which included all sorts of side shows and tactical diversions, such as Ci Kung, Haiku, playful mind games and sorties into the beautiful surrounding landscape and into Assisi itself to open our eyes and minds to the work of Giotto.

Our simple objective was to empty the chattering minds of our participants and guide them gently into the Realm of Creativity, to see, hear, feel the reality of the moment of now, where of course our creativity awaits us.

And we produced a massive amount of paintings, wrote Haikus by the dozen, and this year, as I have mentioned above, we are going to put photography into the mix too.

There! That's what I mean by unusual.

And the Tango?

This just happened serendipitously.

One of the participants, Mauro Magrini (he's Florentine, a photographer), after our sumptuous dinner one evening put on some Argentinian Tango music and started to teach us the steps. I can't explain why, but we got hooked and soon were sailing around our beautiful studio to these haunting sounds.

I think it has something to do with the fact that learning the steps are the key to the door of a temple of dance; that maybe all forms of creativity are like this, that the accumulation of skills runs simultaneously alongside creative expression, that they are not in any way separated.

Our venue is La Casa Faustina, a remarkable place. It is only 7k from Assisi, in the hills to the West of the city. It has the most beautiful huge studio and bright clean apartments, a large swimming pool and a brilliant chef who sustains us with her Italian vegetarian cuisine

And we welcome you to our next workshop weekend in May 11 to 15

You can read more about Assisi here 

Michael

LOST IN VENICE

lost in Venice

Getting lost in Venice.

Is not difficult.

It's happened to me in Florence too.

And Reggio del' Emilia

It's a sort of amnesia.

And I'm getting used to it.

And it's not easy to let go and say to yourself 'OK, I'm lost and I give up'

In Reggio Emilia I had to be at a Tai Chi class absolutely on time. Absolutely.

I was staying with friends and insisted I didn't need their help to find the class.

But could I?

No, I couldn't.

Just drove around for half an hour, spiraling around the inner city ring road where every road looked the same. And then I thought 'I've blown this' turned down a side road, turned off the engine, made an huge deep sigh, looked out of the car window and guess what?

There it was, the Tai Chi centre down a little road and just in view of where I'd parked.

Same this time in Venice.

Fearing the amnesia coming on when I arrived, (late because my train from Civitanova was 30 minutes behind time and I missed the Bologna connection) I turned on my super smart phone satnav;

and what a foolish thing to do. It told me 6 mins from the railway station and when it said zero minutes, I remember thinking 'How can there be such a thing as zero minutes?', when ZACK!,

my telephone battery ran out of juice. Couldn't call friend, couldn't locate house. Began to ask folks passing by and nobody had heard of either her or her house.

Amnesia sets in and I find myself twenty minutes later in the beautiful piazza Campo Santa Margherita. Quite an amazing place, and it's dark and moody and full of people spilling out of bars and shops; Christmas lighting the way only Italians know how to do.

And I thought this is good. And I let go.

I was coming to my senses now (if I dare say that) and saw clearly the road I had entered the Piazza through, retraced my steps, and found myself in familiar territory. As I turned a corner there was a lady and her daughter about to enter a house and I asked if she had heard of la Ca della Corte and she said 'Yes it's right there' and pointed to this iron gate, one which I had passed a dozen times.

If you are still awake, you might have got the gist of the story, so I won't bother to tell you about how I got lost again the day after and nearly missed my train back to Marche. And I won't even mention the near death experience in a Gondola.

Got back home quite late and had a shower and dived into bed, clutching for my nightly dose of Krishnamurti (The Book of Life). where he writes for the day of December 18.....

'The seeking out of something beyond the inventions and tricks of the mind, which means having a feeling for that something,living in it, being it,--that is true religion. But you can do that only when you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life. Then life has an astonishing way of taking care of you, because then there is no taking care on your part. Life carries you where it will because you are part of itself; then there is no problem of security, of what people say or don't say, and that is the beauty of life'

So, that more or less sums up what my photographic workshops are about, being absorbed in the rhythms of life, instead of trying to control it (in this case Venice).

Michael

p.s. still a few places left on my 'Black and White in Venice' workshop February 2017

Creativity and evolution

                                                                          Painting Michael Eldridge 'Adriatic' series

 Leonard Cohen was asked in an interview in the seventies where creativity comes from, and he replied 'If I knew, I'd go there more often' A good question and an even better answer. But I wonder if it really matters what we call this seemingly inexhaustible source; some refer to the Universe or the Cosmic Creative Pool but you could just as easily call it The Cosmic Fridge (I do suppose) for all it matters. We just know that it's there, somewhere between us and outside of us, some space that is continually energised and which usually arrives when it chooses; ready or not. I like to think though, that it also leaves a glimmer of itself inside us, if we were but to know it, some sort of residual memory of its splendour, in passing. Like a glowing ember waiting for us to breath and blow it back to flame and keep it alive should it fade.That it is, if you will, a symbiotic relationship, that we cannot live without each other. Our lives without creativity, whatever form this might take, would become shallow and arid. And creativity without us?

When the first earthquake struck us a few weeks back (here in Italy) there was a roaring which travelled at the speed of a Eurostar beneath our house, and I often think that Creativity is just like this, that it comes roaring past us, maybe always, maybe just when it feels like it, I don't know. But the sure thing is that we have to keep ourselves in a receptive state to be able to catch it like a leaf in a gale and hold it close and accept it as a gift.

You might not be surprised to know that our workshops in Italy are about this fascinating phenomenon; this merger between something which resides within us and something outside of us

which we could call another realm.

Sure, we paint, we take photographs, make music, poetry; but what we produce is incidental.

What?

Yes, incidental.

Read this.....

Who says my poems are poems?

My poems are not poems

After you know my poems are not poems

                                  Then we can begin to discuss poetry

                                                                   Zen Poet Ryokan

That sort of thing.......

So this seeming act of indifference to our work, in fact gives it tremendous freedom and this is when

quite marvellous things begin to happen. It is this that I call creating beyond ourselves; entering this

realm of timelessness, where what we might refer to as our normal selves simply dissolve and

something greater appears.

This is the arena we play in at Starstone.

And we choose places in Italy of great power and beauty, Venice and Assisi, which fuel our adventures with colour and energy, away from la vita abituata, the daily grind.

Michael

Workshops in Italy...

photography Venice, February 2017

painting poetry Assisi, May 2017

Creating beyond oneself

         
                 'Photography and The Creative Mind', Venice February 3 to 6

painting by Michael Eldridge

I just love these words below from Mary Oliver. where she considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art: and which she explores in a wonderful piece titled “Of Power and Time“; that.........

'Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.'

And that...“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time”

I love these sentiments because they are the very philosophy which I have been drawn to all my creative life, and on which our workshops at Starstone have been based. And Oliver articulates it so well; that realm which exists in parallel with the ordinary world we half exist in, where creativity resides and awaits us when we have the courage to lose ourselves in its electric embrace. The extraordinary is what she calls it.

And this is Van Gogh writing to his brother Theo on October 2, 1884......
'If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm — and that’s a lie… That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.

You don’t know how paralysing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves'

One hundred and forty years ago, for goodness sake; a man born way before his time. And maybe that's what artists are, time travelers, never truly content with the age they are living in, but, as Oliver says, driven by forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and seeking refuge in the timelessness of creativity.

Oliver goes on to say that certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

And this reminds me of Krishnarmurti's concept of the young mind (he differentiates between this and the old mind, which is thoroughly conditioned by culture, upbringing and education); .........and the young mind which is free, immensely creative and beyond time.

And it is what I call creating beyond oneself, where in the very act of creating, whether it is in painting, photography, ceramics, cooking, gardening et alia, that we transcend the ordinary and inhabit the extraordinary, that magical realm of creativity. And it is here that we understand what it is to be free.

Michael

 Next Starstone workshop 'Photography and The Creative Mind', 

Black and White inVenice, February 1 to 5, 2021

Brighton Rock

                     Brighton Beach July 23

 When I was a boy, it was our summer treat to be taken to Brighton for the day. We were forced fed Brighton Rock and Wall's ice cream and plonked in a deck chair and told to paddle in the water and brave the wind. (both exceeding good for us)
I remember thinking 'So, this is life?'
Last time I was to go there was when I was eighteen, on the back of a friend's motorbike but was equally unimpressed.
But here I was again in late July running a workshop entitled 'Photography and the Creative Mind'
I arrived a day early to get the feel of the place, wandered along the beach in a southerly direction looking for my B&B and walked into a beach monstrosity. A sort of giant pole without a giant pole dancer with an equally huge metal doughnut on top
And in the Guardian a few days after I get back I see it again. Look at this 
It's that tower! It is!
Now, living as I do in Italy, where this would be a giant chicken perch or a Fire Dept observation tower on top of a mountain, I couldn't help but condemn this as a visual aberration and in no way did I think that it could be anything other than basic functional, like something to do with radio, electricity or gas or sewage. These were my first thoughts.
But it turns out to be a costly work of art.
And this is where we did our morning exercises on the my workshop, right beneath the monstrosity. We did Ci Kung and played a few mind emptying games and turned our bodies into sounding boards, under the ugliest object imaginable. So that set the theme for the weekend; ugliness and beauty. To these add weird.
What is he talking about? I hear you mumble.
And what has all this nonsense got to do with Photography?
Wrong question, I reply. But I'm glad you asked.
(Mind you, you would have to have been there to fully understand but I shall attempt to explain, if inadequately).
Here goes
And it's this, that.......

 'The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable'  ......Robert Henri

That photography isn't just about the eye, or the brain, or indeed the mind, it is about the total absorption of our entire being from head to toe, in the very actuality of the moment. So when Robert Henri writes above, about 'that wonderful state', this is what he means.

And the weekend was about that, turning our entire beings into sounding boards, tightly drawn drums, alert and within every nuance of shifting time.

And the participants were wonderful. They were game for every twist and turn and trick I played on them and, incidentally, produced some excellent imagery. But that is quite beside the point. Because they were the products on which I was focused; cameras are mere machines and three years olds are photographers nowadays

And I sent them away with a survival kit and much to ponder on, much more.

I hope they don't forget.

Look out for more photography and the creative mind workshops on the Starstone site and watch out for more in UK in 2017 and one in Venice planned for winter when the city is dark and moody and haunted and tourist free

Michael@starstone.org

www.starstone.org

About Creativity, Passion and Jack the dog

                                       CREATIVITY, PASSION AND JACK

I am often asked 'What do you mean by human beings creating beyond themselves?'

(This refers particularly to my last blog where I postulated such a notion).

The easy answer is that I read it somewhere years back and liked it and adopted it into my personal useful philosophy phrase box, along with similar phrases like 'You teach best what you most want to know' That sort of useful buzzybrain stuff.

But I feel it does need explaining, (if only to myself).

So let's start with animals.
Jack, for instance, our neighbours' dog.

 Jack is an escape artist, a canine Houdini. He is also a wanderer and Casanova, dog version.

In Italy, where I live, dogs have to be either chained, kept within a fenced garden or on a lead if out with their owner. None of these options appeal to Jack who burrows under deeply dug fences (or climbs over them) bites through chains and leads and consequently is the nicest and brightest dog I have ever met. We are best buddies.

Birds build nests, squirrels, bears, badgers, make winter homes in which to hibernate and cuckoos commit genocide, bird version, by laying there eggs in nest of small birds.

But you know all this stuff

You get what I'm going on this though, don't you?

Animals, and yes human animals, are born with certain instinctive behaviour patterns. but we have that something extra, beyond the basics of territorial imperatives, survival and hunting etc.

And it is this added instinct, or desire if you will.... to create things which have never existed before, this is what I mean by creating beyond ourselves, be it what we call art, a garden, a poem, a tune, and entering what I choose to call the creative garden of now; that realm of total absorption and abandonment where we are alive to our passion. A passion which has no end in view except the act of creation itself

So you've guessed it, this is what our workshops are about, finding out how to enter this state of receptive mind. Not a conditioned mind or a repetitive mind but one which is open to that enriching flow of creative beyondness which is waiting for us all if we had the good sense to step back and recognise it.

Michael and Michelle Rumney are running a workshop May 26 weekend in Assisi 'Time and Space to be Creative' a beautiful place, a sumptuous Italian weekend.

For info you can call Michael or leave a message on WHATSAPP +39 3283535358, SKYPE spiker39

Or email him on michael@starstone.org

A message to my friends

Dear friends,
Firstly, please forgive me if I have already bombarded you with messages from Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, forums, all that stuff that I grope around in; that dark forest of my aimless wanderings and treacle swamps.
This is just to remind you of the workshop which Michelle Rumney and I are hosting in Assisi May 26 to 30. It's about re-awakening creativity.
Stop! I know some of you are thinking 'I haven't got a creative bone in my body', or some such nonsense you were lead to believe in childhood.
 
Truth is, every adult retains within them this wonderful instinct which humans have to create beyond themselves
And what we do in our workshops is quite simply (and as if by magic) turn the key of that old solid creaky oak door and let you back in to the creative garden which has been waiting patiently for your return.
And as if this were not enough in itself, There is Assisi, just 8k down the road; that wonder shining like a diamond perched on the mountains of St Francis. And then there is Casa Faustina itself, with it's wonderful environment and simply delicious Italian vegetarian food.
More on our website www.starstone.org
And email Michael at michael@starstone.org
Much love to you all,