Samantha Humphreys

Art, Photography, Inspiration & Education

Category: The Art And Design Studio

December 6, 2024

Finding My Groove

As I expected, life changed somewhat this year, I left formal education after thinking I would remain involved forever in a job I loved. I fixed some….no, most, of the necessary broken bits of my rapidly and scarily declining mental health and started to find time for dealing with what needs dealing with physically. I developed much of my art practice with new techniques throughout the year. This was mainly because of Project 366 which has forced me to allow daily time for my art and as a result, I feel as though I have practiced ‘extreme art’. The additional skills, as well as being awfully useful as I can now teach more techniques than ever, have released all manner of wonderful chemicals to my brain perfectly complementing those endorphins I get from taking long walks each day.

Additionally this year, I have learned a lot about myself and found ‘where I actually belong’ in the world. As well as being a daughter, a wife and a mum, I feel that maybe life has been like a vinyl record rather than a treadmill and I have finally found my groove. You may well laugh at my cheesy metaphor, (I did) but we tend to see life as a series of milestones, we are conditioned that way. Maybe it’s meant to be a round of possibilities that show themselves at different stages of our life and while we shouldn’t constantly flit from one thing to another : we can settle into something more than once, and we don’t have to be in just one groove forever.

Teaching how creativity can give us the tools we need to maintain a healthy wellbeing is my groove. Journaling has been crucial to developing my own sense of healthy wellbeing is something we take for granted, yet It is in fact a provision we must make for ourselves and it needs checking daily. As an Artist, I take it for granted that creativity is good for the soul, but not everyone sees themselves as creative so how do we encourage exploration of that? Everyone possesses creativity, maybe not in an obvious way, but we all have the ability to mark make, make creative noise or move creatively and we should allow ourselves to do this as much as we give ourselves the time to eat, work and sleep.

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July 21, 2024

The story of how I wrote a really long post and it didn’t save……

Frustratingly, I spent the best part of an hour composing a post about my Art for Wellbeing class yesterday, the plant I chose to draw and study and how it led me to make comparisons to how we develop as humans. I decided that, fate must have decided that it was too long winded and I need to get to the point a whole lot faster because life is too short for unnecessary words!

So you know when you want to ask an older child what their future intentions are, it’s a little awkward asking the patronising question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ . What else could we say without it sounding too formal, final and, for want of a better word, ‘triggering’? But why do we put pressure on humans to ‘grow up’ anyway? The idea of growing up or being grown up has a finality about it that kind of implies that you fully understand how you should approach adulthood and done with learning because you know everything. Can you see how ridiculous that is when written down?

My chosen plant, known as a Drooping Prickly Pear, has so many visible life experiences which was how I came to follow this train of thought. It has both weathered areas, yet is still sprouting new blooms and pads. As people, we are placed under so much pressure to make decisions, as though there is no time after their years of school to decide based on their current circumstances and abilities. Also, we do not learn and grow at the same rate as our peers, or in the same areas of life. Maybe we should instead be asking children at age 14, ‘what do you want to learn next’ (notice I say learn, not achieve). Then the same question can be asked year after year until, as confident young adults they can be asking themselves. The magnificent Drooping Prickly Pear will continue to develop and grow throughout its 20 years or so of life as will its companions in the glasshouse, but they will not reach full development ever-because, there is no such thing as completely developed in living things.

That was considerably shorter and better!

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