art | Samantha Humphreys

February 18, 2025

Sunrise, Frost and Frozen Toes

It was beautiful yesterday morning as I headed over the footbridge on the nature reserve, but oh my was it cold!! This was at 07.38, the sun was coming up promising to warm me, but I was chilled to the bone and I stayed that way for most of the day.

This morning I went for an early swim, also a cold activity but walking home, I was so wrapped up in layers and the sun was out so it was a lovely cosy, comfortable walk back.

For the rest of the day I will choose from the long list of little jobs I have put off until we break for half term, inevitably, a fair few will be put off until Easter and summer breaks but I have become a lot more chilled. I am chipping away at that list slowly and not doing my usual thing of starting one job, then mid way through it, starting another so I can finish the first! There then follows an endless cycle of unfinished tasks and a huge mess.

I feel I am being a bit hard on myself actually, (the old me from a few years back would never have said that…progress indeed) because I have already been busy over the weekend with sorting bags and clothes I no longer need-I have re-organised my art room as I have had more supplies delivered for workshops and cleaned in general quite a lot. So in light of that-finishing reading my book might be bumped to the top of that list, after walking my dog.

Bring on the spring, I am ready for it!

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February 11, 2025

Mastering the Art of ‘Being’

I stopped to look at the tree I pass each day, the reason I stopped was that the skies behind it were divided into a a summer blue and a thundery grey. The sun was bright on and off so there was a moment when the complex system of nerve like branches were very defined. There was a yellow glow through the moss green that highlighted the creases in the bark, reminding me of wrinkles that have been caked in make up.

It is important to take care of yourself mentally as well as keeping physically fit. If you are anything like me, your mind is constantly in overdrive with worries, lists, texts messages and endless pulls on your time and attention. Sometimes, switching to aeroplane mode just for a short while will see you (or feel) reaping the benefits later on. This gives you the chance pay attention to what is around you whether that be an urban concrete landscape or land wrapped in fields, forests and streams. Either way, there will be air, sounds and sights of all sorts.

It is quite tricky to get into the habit of noticing what you see throughout your day. A way of training yourself to do this is the simple exercise of asking yourself: What three colours can I see? then, Choose one of those colours and find three shades of it; so using my photograph above a reference:

‘green/brown/blue!’

Then, as i’m unlikely to find three shades of blue and there are plenty of neutral hues around the centre of the image, I will look for three shades of ‘brown’ …if you are familiar with colours of a artist palette you might say:

Burnt umber/Raw Umber and Ochre or if not then simply Dark Brown/Light Brown/Beige

While you are doing this exercise, you will be unaware of anything that isn’t about those colours, even if it takes you less than a few minutes.

Life is too short for just coasting, doing what we think we should do and not saying things we want to say. Let loved ones know they are loved and also, just as importantly, celebrate that you are alive and take care of you!

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February 9, 2025

Documenting Our Path

Remains of the Day (2025) Mixed Media

So this past week has seemed like I have been throwing loads of balls in the air and seeing whether any land on my head! Sometimes they all landed on my head at once .

This past week in Journaling I have been teaching Gelli Printing as a technique for capturing and documenting a moment. There were some fantastic results, there was also some beautiful debris at the end of the lessons. The technique serves as a reminder that often, the things that we do, result in a bi-product that is sometimes more pleasing and satisfying than our original intention.

Journaling is proving to be a minefield of memories, both for myself as well as my students and clients. Because we talk during the lesson and share experiences (not a requirement to participate, we can just listen to our peers), memories conjure up forgotten similar experiences for us all. I know its a cliche, but talking is precious, we talk, we share and we listen-then we document these memories in any way we like because these precious moments are too much of a treasure to risk forgetting.

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January 27, 2025

That London

*Private View* (2025) Samantha Humphreys

Last week I attended the opening evening of London Art Fair, an event which I have only missed once in the last twelve years. As always, the Encounters section curated by Pryle Behrman was the highlight for me. This year, the work that caught my attention surprisingly for me were a series of paintings by Zbyněk Sedlecký from the Czech Republic who was represented by The Chemistry Gallery.

*Torso I* Oil on canvas (2024) 100 x 70cm

As my own creative practices embrace real life, I was drawn to the beautiful way this artist captures genuine moments that are not in any sense beautiful. Instead, he focuses on the less attractive ‘in between’ times of life. The paintings were mesmerising because they were interchangeable between being photorealistic and richly painterly and my mind seemed to switch between the detailed positioning of the body parts, the exactness of the light bouncing off the cutlery and the blurry fuzziness of the edges of the paintings. I just love them, they are wonderfully dramatic, theatrical and unexciting all at once. The collection is reminiscent structurally of the renaissance period with its grand still life compositions that celebrated wealth and status: though in contrast the artist is honouring the mundane, yet with the same traditional medium that you can almost still smell.

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January 20, 2025

Waiting For the Bus

I was waiting for a bus at Braintree bus station into Chelmsford on Saturday and there were a huge number of pigeons around, no reason, there was no litter or dropped food on the ground so I can only surmise that they are sociable little beings and they like to be around us humans.

I have decided that I need to notice more birds, I will make it a focus of my photography during my walks this year. I’m sure I only see pigeons or robins and I used to see so many more. I remember doing a ‘topic’ as it was called in primary school on birds, learning about the thrushes and what their eggs were like, the excitement of finding pale blue speckled eggshells on the ground under trees. I loved drawing the birds so much so I want to re-capture that joy.

So I started with the pigeons.

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January 18, 2025

Peace and Rose Gold Sky

How beautiful is this? I am so lucky that I have this on my doorstep, for now anyway. It wont be long before this walk will be alongside houses and back garden fences and maybe not such a clear view of the lilac rose gold sunrise and hazy late morning views across the fields.

I heard some lovely words the other day during a journaling for wellness class, “Whatever happens, Don’t die before you’re dead, stay alive…” After some googling, it seems as though this is a part quote from Virginia Woolf. Whether it is or not and I couldn’t find a legitimate source, it packs a punch.

Particularly as later in the day I was asked what job I wish I could have done. My answer was, without a doubt, the job i’m doing now, but I wish I had done it sooner. This of course was not taking into account that I took the route I did through life for a reason, I wouldn’t swap what I have for the world. If I had made different career choices in early adulthood I may not have the family I have now so it was only a ‘without taking all things into consideration’ answer. I also may not have been as engaged and switched on to the importance of creativity in fostering a healthy sense of wellbeing when I was younger. It was something I considered a hobby that I was good at.

Now, I like to think that every choice I have made in life has yielded a success, whether that be a small win amongst what may have seemed like a failure or a huge turning point.

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January 5, 2025

So here it is…2025

Well, that happened fast! A year ago I was sat here making promises to myself that I would scoop myself up from the depths to which I had plummeted to and climb to a reasonable level of better mental health.

Walking in the woods this morning through the dip that has been carved out over time, I was hit by the thought that as I was eye level with tree roots, I must be what once was underground. It was a good grounding (no pun intended) realisation that we need to sculpt our own pathways in life. Some sections of the path is easier for some than it is for others, people face obstacles differently with no two battles won in the same way. There are roots to trip us up along the way if we aren’t careful and either side of us, the strength of the trees and overhanging branches that provide protection and shelter, can also overwhelm; reminding us that we are just a small piece of the artwork and if we don’t look after ourselves; we can easily be beaten.

However, I feel optimistic as I walk through here each morning. The subterranean dip feels safe, the tree roots protect the sides from caving in and although they may cause us to trip from time to time, they also support underfoot. Should I wish to stop moving forward for a time, the tree roots help me out by providing steps out. They also make it easy to step back in when I’m ready.

Steps (2024)

So to summarise as I realise I’m waffling a bit, I can’t help ‘metaphoring’ but I’m a great advocate for how taking time to walk through these kind of spaces provides such clarity to an otherwise smoggy brain; I am in a much better place than I was a year ago. I have developed strategies to take control of my pathway and just being able to ‘be in control again’ laid a strong foundation for me to succeed. It has by no means been easy, I have worked really hard over the past year. As a result, working from my own experiences (sometimes it is advantageous being older) I have been able to develop my practice in therapeutic art and have written and led courses in Art and Wellbeing and bespoke creative workshops.

I love what I do.

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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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August 14, 2024

Foraging

I love that word, Foraging, it feels wholesome and healthy somehow. I have been a manic forager of late as there is an abundance of blackberries near us. I used to go blackberry picking with my grandma, or ‘Mangar’ as we called her, due to the fact that I couldn’t say the word grandma properly when I was little-so it stuck!

We used to have long walks, along Mersey Rd, along Otterspool Prom and other roads that I didn’t know the name of, we always seemed to walk for miles and there was always blackberries somewhere along the route.

Now the funny thing is, I didn’t like them then, which is what brings me to writing this post. I liked the jam that followed the foraging, I liked the routine that happened in the school holidays, I like the memory of Mangar reminding us often that we mustn’t pick the low down blackberries because the Pooka spoils those ones, she was deeply Roman Catholic, Irish and the belief was that the Pooka was the devils horse. This was a far more exciting way of discouraging us from picking the ones near where dogs may go to the toilet I think.

While on a walk last week, there was a small boy with his family, his cheeks stuffed with the fruit and juice running down his chin, his grown up was telling him that she thinks he has had enough now as he has dinner at home. It was lovely to see.

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August 5, 2024

Summer Holidays

The summer holidays have always been a time for me to get the house straight, arrange any medical appointments that weren’t urgent in term time and plan lessons for September. For the first time in years I have total control over when I take my holidays and within reason, spend it how I like. I ‘broke up’ on Saturday afternoon after the last Art for Wellbeing session of the short course at ARU Writtle. I very much enjoyed writing and teaching this and I look forward to the next time. I also met this beautiful little snail who was just chilling on the globe thistle, as were what seems hundreds of other snails. I noticed for the first time, the different patterns on the shell.

This year I have decided I will be enjoying organising my home studio and learning (or strengthening) some practical skills. There is always a different way of applying a skill and many different ways of teaching them. I am also looking forward to my new clients who are looking for some creative life coaching, this is not new to me as I have been teaching creative wellbeing techniques for years but not as a certified life coach.

Of course it wouldn’t be summer in my little corner of the world, without someone setting fire to the field behind our road. As the houses that it backs onto have wooden fences and the fire spreads wildly and rapidly, I imagine it’s quite frightening for those households. On my morning walks there is still pungent evidence of the event and a stark reminder of the overwhelming power of nature.

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Tag: art