The Illustrated House
Unearthing your dreams
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Hi friends and happy Sunday-instead-of-Friday this week! I’m later again because I’ve kind of moved up to ‘marathon runner’ level as a working artist which is both exciting and a totally massive learning curve about how to be creatively productive all day every day and put in the longer hours. Phew! Some very exciting developments have come my way but I shall have to sit on them a while longer until they are public.
“I dream my painting and I paint my dream”- Vincent Van Gogh
If there’s one thing I love about drawing, and probably the reason I ever started, it’s the ways in which drawing (and writing) can help you dig deeply into what is important to you, showing you what it is that your soul and your subconscious pay attention to over and over. That’s actually one of my main reasons behind making a weekly newsletter commitment right now; to go further into unearthing the deep life themes that call to me repeatedly.
I’ve tried to develop the discipline of letting things just come out onto the page before I start using the analytical part of my brain to dissect what might be happening. This is easier to do with imagery than words for me but, the more I manage this, the more I get out of my own way in the real world and things begin to actually happen.
One motif that has followed me for almost two decades of doodling is one of a wee house on a hill with a red roof, a wide open door with light spilling out and some signs that it might be a place of creativity, like music and stories coming out the chimney. It first popped up in my travel journals when I was only 18 with the words ‘all are welcome’ scribbled beside it. It has appeared over and over again since.
The more this little house pops up, the more certain I become that my subconscious is trying to tell me something.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion”- Mary Oliver
So what happens when we just give our devotion a little to these wee things that seem inconsequential. Is it possible that the key to a life of contentment could be to trust and to follow these essential and kind of mysterious leadings? And what are the reasons that we don’t? Trauma? Fear of being different? Having been conditioned by others to think there is something wrong with us? Worry about how we’ll survive?
Now, I am terrible at straightforward meditation (so distractible!), but once I began to devote my creative attention to this little illustrated house motif, to draw it in more detail and wait for detail to emerge, I was met with more answers.
The first layer of realisation was about personal longing, something I’ve talked about in earlier newsletters. The phrase ‘I want to go home’ often crosses my mind, even if I don’t know which home I’m describing. I know from lots of chats with others that this is a common feeling. In some ways, I think my wee house represents a longing for a wonderful, secure place of rest, a place where ‘all is well’. Wouldn’t it be lovely?
The second layer of realisation was about personal values. My wee house taught me about some things that light me up; hospitality, authentic togetherness, storytelling, music, simplicity, colourful aesthetics and natural beauty, sharing community, openness and mutuality. Despite my current state of success at including these things in my life (or not), the wee illustrated house reminds me over and over, ‘This is what you want and need’.
The third layer of realisation was that perhaps the illustrated house could be a real place. In these last 20 years, I’ve experimented and learned an immense amount about creating space for others to join in creatively; opening storytelling cafe venues, opening my home, creating spaces within schools and community groups for people to write and make art, supporting individuals with their passions and learning all along the way about how to deal with the nuts and bolts of things like planning permission, budgets, accessibility, and unclogging the loo!
The photo above is from exactly 10 years ago. I feel like I had a lot more certainty about following dreams back then but I also had a lot of thing still to learn about how to succeed. I actually had forgotten about this photo completely and it was only typing ‘red roof’ into my dropbox folder that unearthed it. There’s the motif again though- a red-roofed house with light spilling out! I remember making this for the my shop window for the opening day of my storytelling cafe project ‘Our Story’ in 2013. I’m kind of sad about what feels like a long gap in which I slightly lost faith in this process of trusting the inner voices that speak about dreams, but I also know it’s not too late to come back to it.
“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears”- Rumi
I firmly believe that we have to ‘start where we are’ as I said last week. A powerful mentor and friend in my life, Chika Inatimi, taught me to ask these questions.
Who am I?
Where am I?
What are my hopes and dreams?
In asking them, the idea is to map out where you are right now, what you DO have available to you and how you’re going to get where you want to go.
So here is how I answer that today when it comes to this illustrated house dream. I think my dream is to create a beautiful place somewhere, a semi-residential retreat where people can come and re-engage with childlike creativity, develop their writing, their art, their music, meet experienced mentors and tutors, be looked after for a while so that they can feel a bit like a kid again, sit in a garden a while. There is narrative illustration on the wallpaper and the soft pillows, hand-painted folk motifs on wood beams, poetry carved into the rocks in the garden and wee characters hiding there. There are studio spaces, library spaces, irregular edges, cosy corners, a big table and fireside. My illustrated house shines light out the way into the world and she welcomes everyone, especially those who couldn’t otherwise access such a place. When you leave my illustrated house, you feel energised, a part of you has come alive again, you want to run down the hill and tell your friends, you want to come back again, you stay in touch with the others your met there and help keep each others’ dreams alive and spirits up in the real world.
Who am I and where am I? Well, I’m a person capable of envisioning big picture things and planning for detail, or inviting others and their strengths to the table in the acknowledgement that they excel in that which I am lacking. I’m a normal person from a working-class background with a mixture of life experiences that I feel have allowed me to develop some empathy. I’m not afraid of looking or sounding silly and writing newsletters like this one about magical houses and other things that feel risky to say in public. I’m ok with rawness and emotional honesty, I can sit with the grief of others and get so excited when I see someone coming to life about their passions. I’m in a village in County Durham where I not originally from, divorce has left me back at square one economically, I have two children to consider and no relatives around, but I DO live with some wonderful and wise friends. I’m recovering my health and confidence. I’m letting go of old ways and looking for new ones.
When I consider the above, I get a feeling that I have some steps to take to be ready for THE illustrated house (and no idea how I’d finance it), but I’d LOVE something like this to be my job alongside continuing to write and illustrate my own books. I’m ready to get more specific this year and start sketching the inside of this house dream, looking for collaborators and learning opportunities. It feels like the best co-creation fun ever. I hope it will come to life in maybe 3 or 4 years. Maybe it’s even possible that art and stories will be the way the finance emerges and that we’ll celebrate and memorialise this on the opening day of the house. Why not, eh?
Maybe I’ll see you there!
“Life is BIG- be all you can be” - Chika Inatimi
What is your own ‘Illustrated House’? What is the thing that just KEEPS coming back to your mind? Do you need more tools to help discover it? Do you need friends? I’d love to know what you need, I’d love to discover how to facilitate that for people going forward.
Finally, here is someone I love who embodies the idea of ‘starting where you are’ and letting the path rise up to meet you. Disabled Nova Scotia artist Maud Lewis never travelled more than 100 miles from her tiny house, a place she covered in beautiful and joyful painted motifs and sold painting for $5 from the roadside. Her work and her influence ended up spreading around the entire world. What an inspiration!
Much love and keep your dream fires burning!
Gill x
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This week:
I LOVE this talk by Barbara Sher, which I first heard in 2018. In it, she talks about how people can thrive more by helping one another achieve their dreams and goals rather than just focusing on their own. I experimented with her method right after I heard it in a small group of about 30 people. In my ‘ask’, I wished for an orchestra to work with on a storytelling show idea and someone in the group knew and connected me to an orchestra leader who was willing within a DAY. One lady’s wish was to meet rock star Alice Cooper and in a group of 30 folk, we discovered we had connections to TWO members of his band. Everything is more possible that it seems.
My very talented friend Rosie Bradford, a super-gifted singer, coach and choir leader has written a brilliant book called ‘Good Things Happen When We Sing. I had the pleasure of participating in her workshop and they involved so much emotional exploration and healing as well as the vocal elements themselves. Her book is here and she offers coaching too!
I don’t know how to describe how much I love this painting by my good friend Jackie Stonehouse, available from Pineapple Gallery in Bishop Auckland. I saw it mid-progress and have been thinking about it since. Someone go get this and live with it, already!
Speaking of good things happening when we sing, I’m utterly enamoured with the sibling musical trio Biko’s Manna from South Africa. So much talent. A YouTube clip below and here is the first reel I heard of theirs and was stopped in my tracks by.
And finally, Happy International Women’s Day!
This is the first post by you I have read and it is inspiring. I too am a writer and artist who has their own version of the perfect someday house. I am in the process of establishing my own community of creative and spiritual people, a community where we support and encourage each other. Thank you for your beautiful words.
Your read roofed dream of a house sounds like the perfect place to come home to - I so hope I can visit when you open the doors. Thank you for this lovely post 🥰