Where's your mind art?

Sorry for those of you who look in regularly, it's been a month. I did start the year with the ambition to post at least once a week, which I thought was doable considering that good bloggers post once a day. But didn't happen. Largely thanks to the fact that my life is dedicated (against my will) to being a secondary school teacher. Anyway, that is in hiatus at least for the next two weeks.

By the way...if anyone wants to argue to toss about how many holidays teachers get, just be aware that they are necessary to prevent multiple homicides, suicides or other unhealty addictions. My term ended with two hefty adolescent boys going at each other during art class. Took 3 mins and 3 teachers to get them apart...you could smell the Testosterone...everyone involved a wee bit freaked out.

Yes, all in a days work for a lowly teacher. Anyway, been doing a bit of automatic drawing again, cause I need to do something creative and I can't quite find the time to get into proper projects. Some results below. Not sure what they say about where my head is at...

Then there was this, which kind of started out as a blotches and blobs and went from there. Not quite automatic drawing, more like semi-automatic, I guess.

Back to the Grindstone

Really struggling with the whole daily routine this year; in particular, trying to fit in some creativity. Nett result is I am becoming a cranky old bag at home and abroad (just ask the year 7s). I am trying to change that but it seems to be getting harder, not easier. Life is clearly too short to be spending time doing things you don't love, but then there's the minor issue of putting your kids through school. Still, I may have to decide to step back a bit from the whole teaching gig in order to get my life back a bit. Not likely to happen this year though.

Anyhoo, have done some more automatic drawing and this is the result:

Automatic Art

Went to the Surrealist Exhibition the other day. I was generally impressed, more to be reminded of what they were on about than particularly this exhibition. My major disappointment was the lack of variety of artists represented, and those that were there were not necessarily the best pieces in my opinion, e.g. Joseph Cornell's museum object. And there was not much representation of the female artists from the period - Georgia O'Keefe, Leonor Fini, Frida (although she didn't like to be called a Surrealist) and women like that. There is one piece - probably my favourite in the exhibition - by Dorothea Tanning; a fab installation, so that is something.

Anyway, have been playing around with the idea of Automatic Art, which is effectively glorified doodling, and these are some of the results: