Concealed from the half-sleeping world of bland normality in an apartment that stares like any other onto a street like any other, she paints — she paints in words and pictures; poetry and light; reflections and enchantments; open doors and fae-veiled wisdom.
Hélène Deroubaix is a mixed-media artist, writer and photographer from the North of France. In all her arts she was self-taught, beginning as a poetic writer and collage artist and armed with the firm belief that to draw is not a necessity for an artist; indeed, in art the strength of expression is always greater than the means and Hélène’s work exposes no shortage of strength. Her artistic language is heavily stylised, evocative, whimsical and honest, speaking directly to the unclothed spirit. (more…)
The creative process is one of the greatest mysteries and marvels of our universe. The world agrees that it is a very good thing to be “creative”, yet it cannot agree on what it means to create — underneath the umbrella of arts education, the process is largely taught almost as a science, buried in systems and models, in which the end result becomes a product of the mastery of those systems.
For many people, this seems to work well enough. And there is nothing so very wrong with religiously following a model that works. Besides, you can’t write a novel if you don’t have a vocabulary, nor paint a portrait if you don’t know how to hold a brush. See, there is no denying that technical skill is necessary to an extent, but to be obsessed by technique is limiting. Thinking wholly in terms of a series of techniques to be applied seems to me to be a dry and slightly backwards approach to art, since creativity is organic and cannot be harnessed by static rules. There is an entire ocean beneath that surface, and I think that so much of its beauty and the wonder is lost through such a rigid and analytical mindset; a system works because it obeys the laws of the universe but the system is not the law. Everything in this world is a description — an expression — of fundamental forces operating on levels that our most advanced science has barely begun to comprehend. (more…)
Poetic, honest and uplifting, the music of independent artist and producer Queenie has a unique spirit that is rarely found in the commercial mainstream.
I first learned of this remarkable lady’s work two years ago, after an online acquaintance dropped her name into the middle of a conversation; apparently, this artist’s music and mine had a few traits in common. Well! Always the curious one, I scurried off into the ever-faithful Internet Realms in search of this supposedly kindred music, and, sure enough, my trusty iTunes search bar led me to a charming little song called ‘Dream of Flight’. Now, after throwing it on repeat and listening happily to it for half a day, I am thoroughly ashamed to admit that my usual sieve-brain kicked in and somehow I never actually followed up this discovery until two years later on an inexplicable whim. Needless to say, I’m glad I did — Queenie’s exquisite songwriting deserves more than a single fleeting glance; the lyrics alone hold enough layers to keep your imagination from tiring, while delicate melodies glide effortlessly over beautifully crafted piano lines, and Queenie’s voice itself is ethereal with a unique character and grace. (more…)
A thousand phantom butterflies
in painted hues my shifting skies
caress, their spectral forms belied
in thread & dye, by night untied
& each in half-light flickering;
each to fade as it begins
to shine, its newborn trembling wings
unfurled in flight to truer things,
to haunt me as each sun sinks down –
what now remains of who I am?
& where each ghostly thread began
whose were the needle & the hand?
So while my self in only these
ghost-guided threads each day is wreathed,
tomorrow lies eternally
in tapestries I cannot see.
.~♥~.
Tapestries, threads, cocoons, butterflies and ghosts — the more I think about it, the more I realise that grasping at symbols and images is my only hope of expressing a rather clumsy perception of a poetic and complex existence; my life on earth as a human being. This is a life of patterns and processes, endlessly repeating and folding back on themselves, of tides and transformations, of illusions and reflections and of infinite layers and dimensions. (more…)