Colours made from plants fade inevitably. Sometimes the colour fades in hours, days. The longest lasting plant pigments, carefully prepared, fade in decades. But they fade.

And I can’t help but love finding the hidden colours of plants, and to want to paint with them.

Jason Logan from the calls the colour extracted from plants alive, connecting the changes the colour goes through on the page to the changes in a living being.

But I think the truth is plant colour is a dying thing.

When you make colour from plants, you are not usually making the same colour as the brilliantly coloured flowers while they are alive. Most colours in petals and leaves start the process of breaking down as soon as they are picked. Those are the deeply fugitive colours.

I’m using photos from making a lake pigment out of red cabbage, one of the brightest, most changeable and ultimately dullest grey of plant colours. I wanted to experience the changes.

Some plants have certain flavonoids in them - anthroquinones, luteins and anthrocyanins. On dying, the cell walls break down and the flavonoids are released. The juices are cooked up and the glucose chain is broken off the molecule. And only now, after accelerating the decay, the long lasting colours are finally fully visible.

These colourful pigments will keep on reacting with oxygen though, finally turning brown or grey. And UV will will keep on breaking down the molecule until it fades completely away.

So gradually the plant colours I have captured and put down on the page will fade away, leaving me with painted ghosts of colour.

It’s not so much the aliveness of plant inks - but they are changing, not stuck in a deathless synthetic stasis like modern industrial pigments are. These changes, this breaking down, is part of the same cycle of life and death that we are bound to inescapably

In Timor-Leste (East Timor) where I first learnt about plant colours (read more about that here), the Tetun language uses the same word for both ‘alive’ and ‘bright colour’. A muted colour is literally a ‘dead’ colour. Unsurprisingly, very bright colours are everywhere, and people tell me they can’t understand why we foreigners always want to wear subdued, ‘dead’ colours.

So that was part of the journey that lead me here, really. A decision inspired by made while I was learning in Timor-Leste to delve into what they call dead colours has led me to grapple with my own interpretation of whether a colour is alive or dead, and how to integrate the thoughts of fading away into my work.

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Push the button to let me know what you think about fugitive pigments in art, it’s something I wonder about a lot.

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Ending with a photo from an exhibition of the conservationists careful work to keep fragile paintings alive for as long as possible on currently at the National Library of New Zealand

We have just passed mid winter solstice here. It is cold but I am working with summer in my studio.

Late summer I made an art journey with my great friend Kath. We try and do this once a year, going somewhere and just making art all day together for as long as we can. It’s quite special to just think art and make art and talk art all day.

This year we were on the very wild Wairarapa coast, with lots of seals and lots of wind.

I tried out lots of wild local plants for colour - ice plant, seaweeds and lupins. Kath kept bringing me other plants she had found to test too.

Standing in the sand dunes moving through the clumps of lupins, harvesting yellow flowers . Surrounded by bees, sunshine, wind, the glorious smell of the lupin flowers - sort of like honey, like how i imagine Provence smells (never actually been there).

Collecting the plants, sitting on the wild beach drawing, I thought Yes. This is what I should be doing. I have to fill my life with this.

The lupins, an invasive species here , were very successful. Ice plant was pretty good, too, but I was having difficulty being sure I had the invasive non-native species rather than the rare native ice plant. So I only took a tiny amount to test.

The sharpness and strength of the yellow from lupins was a good surprise. Warm, brownish yellows are fairly common in plant colours, but not such a cool yellow.

I kept a wine bottle of the extracted dye in the fridge (carefully marked, it looked a bit too much like white wine) for four months.

Now I am turning it into a lake pigment, and my studio smells like honey, like summer, like being on the wild coast with all the seals and the bees.

The sense of exploration is such a delight. How much lupin lake pigment has been made in the world before?

The outcome - three bottles of yellow ink, and three bottles of green - made form the lupin lake with a wee drop of indigo added.

The colour, like summer, doesn’t last forever.

In pottering about mode you do things , but only as a response to the things around you, only as the jobs call out to you. A potterer will do something for as long as it still seems like a good idea to do it, and drop it when interest drops away.

With no agenda, no checklist, nothing is ‘ruined’ when you switch tasks without finishing. There can be no failure in pottering mode.

Well, when pottering you can break or ruin something, but it’s not as if you have failed at crossing things off your list and falling short of all the things you thought you ought to have done.

Gardening is the great teacher of the skill of pottering about. As you are deadheading the roses, you spot a patch of weeds, then you see the lemon tree needs a bit of a prune, so you flit about the garden happily a bit like a bumble bee, getting the nectar from one little job then moving on when the nectar is gone.

The work you are doing automatically adjusts itself to the energy you have and the pleasure you are feeling.

Every task that actually gets finished is a bonus, not a necessity. Or even a possibility, really - in a garden there will always be more things to do and that isn’t a problem, it’s just in the nature of a garden.

The top-down, linear processes of the mind are not engaged in pottering about. It is a bottom-up, visually responsive part of your mind that decides what is important to do. And spending time in this visual, bodily-engaged mode makes life better, less anxious.

The Shed and the Studio as well as the Garden are places where pottering holds power. I think a key to good pottering about is having interesting projects scattered around the space, projects you can see and visually respond to. In the shed or the studio, you can tinker away at one contraption until the next one calls out to you. And learning to hear when the objects you make are calling out to you is very much the work of art making.

Those spaces are defined and enclosed - you can only see things related to that particular world. Other things don’t intrude. With the boundaries built into these spaces, your brain doesn’t need to work hard, doesn’t use up scarce willpower, to keep you in the zone.

In Pottering Mode, the mind has time to slowly integrate and process knowledge, slowly connect your thoughts and the environment together.

New ideas are happy to jump into your lap on a pottering day.

I’m thinking about all this as I re-organise my studio. I have an extra room to work in now. It’s a warm indoors room so I can do writing, journalling and business things inside and messy, splashy painting and ink making in the outside studio. I’m so happy! But as I sort things around between the two work rooms, I am trying to make sure they both support pottering about as much as my garden does.

And I’ve created a kind of defined pottering space in my computer, with Notion. These pages all show the zones I do computer-based work in and I can pretty much just open Notion and potter about in these sections, just as I feel like it and end up with plenty of work done. and importantly, not feel exhausted and frustrated at the end of it.

And it seems possible that just enjoying what you are doing makes you productive.

I think for years when I was younger I did nothing but pottering. There was a kind of dark side - I never finished anything. Ever. I would flit from unfinished degree to an unfinished novel, random job to the next random job. It has been a long journey for me to find out how to enter Finishing Mode, how to actually make the push to hit the publish button. How to not wriggle away and just potter around for longer and a bit longer. To meet the fear and pain that come up when I try to put work out there.

So I seem to need to push into Finishing Mode on some kind of regular basis, with some level of determination. But once I am there, it seems too easy to become obsessive, self-critical and harsh. That’s when I need to go back out to the garden. And remind myself to just potter about.

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Requests for attention from my family, guilt about housework, about not making much money - all need to be ignored. That certainly feels selfish.

The other part that makes art seem even more selfish artist is the time I spend sending out to the world that I have made art, and maybe they might like to look at it. It all feels very self-centred, very ‘look at me’, to be doing that consistently (actually I am not very consistent, but I try)

A lot of the women artists I know find this feeling of selfishness incredibly difficult too.

We equate finding time to make art with finding time for ourselves. And maybe don’t give ourselves as much time in the studio as we would like.

For the last ten months I have been doing something completely different - volunteering in Timor-Leste. I’ve been working with Reloka, a group helping preserve Timor-Leste’s natural dye heritage. And I haven’t made any art at all.

So it has felt like a relief, a breather, for me to be thinking entirely about helping other women promote and improve their income from their indigenous art form, the tais. (see an excellent video here

Volunteering in a developing country means I make do with a lot less in my life. I live in a pretty basic house, with very few belongings, very little internet, very few shops, and all too often without electricity and water when the infrastructure fails. Physically it is all quite uncomfortable and devoid of all the little luxuries.

So of course all this feels very unselfish of me, in contrast to art making.

But it’s not that simple. While I am honestly spending my time doing the things I hope and trust will bring the best development outcomes to the group I am working with, I am getting so much for myself out of this. The withdrawal from over-stimulation and over-consumption benefits me hugely. The relationships I make in this other environment are clear and happy and bring me so much contentment.

I also get a lot of relief from my anxiety over the problems of the world. Focusing on this one small subset of the world’s huge set of problems gives me relief from that horrible feeling so much of us are experiencing ‘everything in the world is going wrong and I can’t do anything to fix it’ 1(footnote) A feeling that makes me constantly brittle and guilty back in New Zealand.

Doing this volunteer work, you kind of get a sense of perspective that has been very healthy for me. I suppose in terms of control and anxiety over the worlds problems it feels like you are living that prayer ‘give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other…’. I am doing what I can, it’s not that much in the big context, but I know the rest of it is out of my ability to touch, let alone fix.

And also it is just so much fun to be volunteering here! There are lots of novel problems to try and solve, which makes my brain so happy. Particularly this assignment - developing a dye garden and studio - I found a huge, delightful, new obsession with finding the hidden colours in the landscape. And the people I get to work with, I learn so much from them.

Now I have just back home in New Zealand.

Back to my studio at last, and back to an art practice.

Again spending all my time on what I want to do.

And spending time thinking about how this selfish following of my obsessions and desires is also perhaps not all selfish.

Art can do this thing, of transmitting feelings from one human to another, sometimes very clearly. And if I can mange to transmit all the peace and awe I work to develop in the studio, that could actually be a very unselfish thing to do.

And all the other artists, too, who are maybe struggling themselves in their studios. Bringing all the good things to the other humans.

I have added here by a work I made in 2015, ‘A Line’. I actually made this a few weeks before my first volunteer assignment to Timor-Leste. It took me nearly two years disassembling all the thoughts about what I ‘ought’ to be painting before I could bring it all down to my own joy in mark making.

A video by Timor Aid showing the entire process of tais weaving-

For me, the next creative adventure has begun.

(p.s. this post is too long for email, click through to see the full post or go to the Substack app)

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I am here, in Reloka’s dye garden in the outskirts of Timor-Leste’s capital Dili.

And Mana Secilia is alight with anticipation.

She has spotted an abandoned rice paddy taken over by wild indigo in the neighboring district of Manatuto.Let’s get hold of a car on Friday and go and harvest it, she says.

Are you coming with us, mana Helen? (Mana means big sister, we all call each other mana or maun - big brother - here). Of course I will.

I am in Timor-Leste with my husband who is volunteering (through VSA) with a micro-finance group and I am volunteering with Reloka. Reloka is on a mission to both record traditional knowledge of plant dyes and to improve natural dying techniques here. Mana Secilia is their dye master.

Plant dyes are used in the traditional weaving, called tais. Tais have long been the primary art form in Timor-Leste - so much so that the UN has recently declared Timorese tais an intangible treasure. But the knowledge of the dye plants used to colour the tais is close to being lost.

Disappearing knowledge

Resistance to the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste (from 1975-1999) was widespread and if a village was suspected of harbouring rebels, massacres were often the tragic ending.

The Timorese who are alive now are very often the ones who fled into the wild, dense mountain jungle and lived there (sometimes for years) hunting and foraging.

Many would return to their villages to find everyone killed.

In terms of cultural destruction, this was a double edged sword. While living in the jungle, they could not practice the more settled arts like weaving and dyeing. So practical experience was lost.

More than that, the chain of inherited knowledge was broken. Each family or kin group would have secret dyeing recipes, techniques, and rituals that would be passed down only from mother to daughter. But when the mother or daughter died from starvation or was killed before the knowledge could be transmitted, that chain was broken forever.

So industrially produced threads imported from Indonesia have taken over for tais weaving. The smooth, fine and brightly coloured industrial threads make vibrant, smooth and fine woven tais. They have become so popular that now the brilliantly coloured tais made from synthetic dyes are almost a defining mark of Timorese culture. The muted, earthy natural plant colours look dingy next to them. (Actually everything looks dingy next to the bright synthetically coloured tais).

A good article on tais by Sara Niner is here and a video showing the complete process of spinning, dyeing and weaving tais here

The journey

The Reloka Kor Natural team (Secilia, Julia, Hagai and Julia’s brother) set off and Mana Secilia spots the field of wild indigo. A rice paddy that has been left un-tended by an elderly couple has been taken over by Indigo tinctiforia. It looks, and grows, a bit like wild broom. The wild indigo stretches out over acres.

It is a delight to see this ‘blue gold’, the valuable source of clear, deep blue growing wild.

We chat to the old man who owns the fields. He is sitting by his stall on the side of the road, where he sells his farm produce, a rather laid back chap. Today he has one papaya only to sell in his stall.

Julia asks to buy it, but he wants $2 and Julia only wants to pay $1.

We tell him we are interested in his indigo and will be back later in the day, if he is amenable to us giving him some money to collect indigo leaves. He is indeed amenable, but surprised. He has no idea that this plant growing everywhere is anything other than a weed.

But we can’t do business with him about his indigo yet. We are visitors to this district, and it is very bad manners to just go into someone else’s district and walk around and do business without a proper invitation or permission.

Our first step is to find the village Xefi (chief - an elected position). We find him repairing the village road together with almost all the villagers. We have prepared an official letter, with the Reloka letterhead and properly signed and stamped, talking about the Reloka mission and why we want to collect indigo in this village. We hand the letter to his teenage daughter to read aloud and he gives us his consideration, and agrees to sign the letter.

We are not finished, because we need permission from the head of the larger sub-district too. So we drive off to find the administrative headquarters, where the Suko (sub-district) Xefi will be.

We take off our shoes and enter the verandah of the wonderfully blue Suko administration building. Some kind women greet us, give us seats and invite us to wait for the Xefi to return from church. We wait a very long time, chatting with the women, reading aloud our letters explaining why we want to be here.

No-one here uses indigo for dyeing, they tell us. In fact no-one realises it is a dye plant at all. Instead it is used as a medicine, the green leaves taken as an effective tonic. Like many dye plants, indigo is also full of medicinal compounds. No-one in the smaller village knew of it as a dye plant, either.

The Suko Xefi never comes back from church, so in the end we are given permission to carry on by the women who have been talking to us.

Negotiation

We return to visit the field of indigo, now that we have the permission to start negotiating. The stall has been stocked with a bit more produce since we left and the owner has been joined by his more assertive wife, who has heard that a group of people, including a ‘malae’ (foreigner) want to harvest the weed growing in their abandoned paddies.

She is energetically chewing the mildly addictive betel nut, popping nut after nut into her mouth with a speed I have not often seen here in Timor-Leste.

We open with an offer of $5 for the right to collect half of the plant leaves.

She responds with disbelief. I have expenses! she declares. I need to buy more betel-nut! It always running out and it’s not cheap, you know.

Also, she adds, you have a malae in your group. (That’s me, of course). If you have malae, she says, you have lots of money! Malae always have so much money, so that means you must be a rich group. The price is double, I need $10 for this. I’ll be able to get all the betel nut I need, this way.

She is completely determined, tough negotiator, so $10 it is.

I ask if I can take her photo. She wipes the bright red betel juice off her mouth and in an inspired bit of ad-hoc marketing, holds up a papaya to her face and smiles happily to the camera.

Julia comes to an agreement about the price of the papaya, and we go to get the indigo.

Harvesting and processing

This is long hard work for the team, and eventually our truck is loaded up with as much indigo as we can fit in.

Now the indigo needs soaking in water for a few days, then the liquid needs aerating, alkalizing and then the beautiful deep, bright blue indigotin powder settles in the liquid, ready to be used.

I’m going to be having a lot fun with this.

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This year, I know what the maximum weight of art I will be making is - it will be 5 kilograms.

That’s all the supports, pigments and tools i have for the period of April to December.

I have moved to Timor-Leste, (East Timor) with my husband, who is volunteering with a micro-finance company here. VSA organises all this, and sponsors us to be here.

They let us bring one large suitcase to hold all the things, the things I will need not only for art making, but quite a lot of everything else too.

Timor-Leste is remote, and poor. There are no shops that sell things like light-fast paint or acid free paper.

What to pack?

I won’t be able to order things online here, because the there is no postal service. So anything I order simply won’t arrive.

I have one chance to get it right, and pack everything I think I might use to make art for seven months.

And I have to pack everything else I need or want that won’t be able to buy in Timor-Leste, too. Which is quite a lot (a huge medical pack, all my shoes and clothes etc etc) - about 25kg worth so that leaves 5kg of my 30kg for art materials.

The paper is the hardest, the heaviest.

I brought 200 sheets of A4 200gsm good drawing paper. I can fold it in half and bind it up into a nice little sketchbook, or use a whole sheet for a drawing.

But, oh, how I wish I had also brought another 200 sheets of good 125gsm paper too! I haven’t been able to use a single sheet of my acid free paper because the scarcity paralyses me.

When I go to make a drawing, I have to have the freedom to not care if it is a very bad drawing.

I don’t know how many bad drawings other artists make before the good drawings come out, but I know have to make a lot of really bad drawings!

That means having enough paper.

Enough paper to try something, see it not work out, pick up another piece of paper and try something else, and feel absolutely no sting of regret.

I’ve trained myself pretty well now to release all judgement of my bad drawings. If something looks awful, I know (after a long time of working through all this!) not to make a bad drawing mean I am a bad artist, that a bad drawing is just a piece of paper with an experiment on it, and the experiment failed. A bad drawing is just a data point, information about how one thing is not working right now.

I’ve trained myself to acknowledge I haven’t lost anything by making a bad drawing, I have gained something - all I have lost is a piece of paper.

Now, losing that piece of paper is a big problem!

Now, when I get out a piece of my precious acid free paper and make the inevitable bad drawing, I will only have 199 other chances to make a good drawing. It doesn’t seem like enough!

Pigments

Fortunately water colours are by nature extremely concentrated materials. I have worked out a good palette for myself, but I throw in a good number of extra tubes too, they are not heavy.

But I also am read to try a new medium, one that will work well with traveling.

I land on coloured pencils, which I haven’t used since I was about 11 years old. I am instantly happy - the soft gentle stroking of pencil on paper is so soothing.

Coloured pencils are so forgiving too! One works so lightly that the mistakes are tiny delicate little things, they hardly seem to aggravate me at all.

Art about what?

So now, in response to both the new medium of coloured pencils and the paper limit, I am doing deliberate practice, basic exercises, using the pencils in locally available available low quality sketchbooks.

And when I have done ‘enough’ of this sort of practice, I can get out my good paper and do the ‘real’ drawings.

It’s the exact opposite of my usual way of working, where I put everything into eliminating the difference between the ‘practice’ work and the ‘real’ work - now I am stiffening and formalizing the boundaries between those two things instead. It feels very odd.

Most artists I know find it helps them to feel free to respond to fleeting ideas about new colours (or anything) when they are surrounded by an abundance of materials. I don’t think I know any artists who are minimal with their gear, even if their art itself is pretty minimalist.

How long could you last without an art supply shop? I adore them and miss not being able to soak up all the beautiful supplies. I’m hoping I can make it to 7 months (and still actually make the art), otherwise it is a US$800 trip over the border to Indonesia for a very serious shopping trip!

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I’ve just been part of an amazing group exhibition Tracing Intricacies at Webb’s and two days after the opening night, I flew out of Wellington to Timor-Leste, where I will be living for the next seven months or so.

When it was all at its most frenetic and stressful, I asked myself ‘Why am I even going through all this stress of exhibiting?’

(For anyone else considering it, moving country and exhibiting at the same time is not recommended)

Exhibiting makes you very afraid of everything that can go wrong (or it does to me anyway) - scared the art will get ripped or damaged - and very scared of people declaring it all rubbish and I should be ashamed to call myself an artist.

I realised that I actually didn’t have to exhibit at all! It’s a choice I decided to make along the way. And I can un-make that choice if I really want to.

I know a couple of artists who seem to have made that choice not to exhibit.

So why I am choosing to do this, and going through all this stress and fear. There must be a reason, beyond simple careerism!

Other people

The first reason, of course, is to share your work- the materiality of it - with other people.

This is vastly important, a train of thought worth its own post, but working towards this particular exhibition highlighted the forcing function of an art deadline.

The forcing function

Exhibiting is the crucible I need, forcing me to make decisions, to make them strongly, quickly, effectively.

It forces me to ask ‘Is this piece good enough?’ And find the reason why it is or isn’t. That’s a really important question, and the pressure of exhibiting pushes me hard to respond to that.

The fear I feel interferes intensely with this decision making, leaving me vibrating between ‘nothing is good enough’ and ‘I have to put ALL of the paintings up to prove I have done enough’

A hard path to navigate, but I think I get a little bit better at it each time.

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Technical resolutions

Before I knew I was traveling this year, I had all sort of complex ideas about how I might get my very large lines to hang on the wall in the way I wanted. I was going to be testing all sorts of glueing and laminating methods I had dreamed up. It was a difficult, expensive, time consuming plan.

But when the opportunity for this particular exhibition came up with rather a short time line, I knew I had to get the existing paintings to hang on the wall effectively, right now.

Another gallery had sewn one of my lines on canvas and hung it on metal rods. It was a good solution, referencing the scrolls and Asian brush work that is important to me. I just did’t like the metal rods very much.

I had to find my bravery and take the paintings to a sailmaker (who was lovely) to sew up these paintings, and trust him not to get the paintings dirty or damaged, to sew neatly and unobtrusively and not sew over the paint marks I had made.

It is very scary to sew over already painted paintings!

I would never have risked that if I didn’t have an exhibition coming up.

The first set of timber battens I made didn't fit, so the day before the assigned delivery I had to stay up all night making another set of battens and hope that they would work.

It was finishing energy let me stay up all night, let me approach people I am scared to talk to, let me risk damaging the paintings to get things to work.

Finishing energy let me get done in two weeks what would have taken me months of dithering and pottering and likely getting nowhere much.

And it worked. It worked well.

Artificial deadlines

Finishing energy is so powerful I think we want it all the time so we create artificial deadlines.

Hence the horrible SMART goal, where you try to say you will lose precisely X kilos by precisely X date. SMART goals like these are attempting to get you to put finishing energy into your day to day life, the way you work, eat or move.

But I think it’s the wrong energy to use up in your daily life. It’s so powerful that trying to drum it up for day to day use leaves you will drained and burnt out.

The pace of finishing energy

Yearly

I try to push myself to make one exhibition (or some other form of publicly launched work) every year so I can access the willpower to refine projects, get them finished, and have the bravery to do the promotional work.

So I am inviting a good dose of finishing energy into my life, using self-set deadlines, but only where it matters most to me,in my art.

Monthly

And this Substack is another way of inviting finishing energy into my work.

Writing with a dose of finishing energy means the loose dreamy thoughts can cohere into packets, little bundles of ideas that can be shared and transmitted to others.

*Moving country left me pretty depleted, so the little bit of finishing energy needed to post this has been missing until now!

Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity is a worthwhile read and a bit of an instruction manual for planning on how to use finishing energy for big, important long term projects, rather than using it up on less meaningful, quick outcomes.

I also wrote about sitting and doing nothing, the opposite of pushing yourself through deadlines -

It is a week where I have completed my tax returns, and that was hard. It is a week where I had a huge battle with my inbox, no fun at all. But I did it.

Yet sitting here is harder, harder by far.

I am surprised by how extreme the battle with those internal voices telling me not to do this has been. My mind is telling me that updating my neglected archive is definitely more vital to my art success than simply drawing things.

I hadn’t realised quite how much I have been leaning on always working on specific, well defined , purposeful art projects to defeat that resistance.

So it seems only by turning up to these ‘pointless’ workbook sessions I am going to be able to dismantle resistance more thoroughly.

Why am I sitting here anyway?

A terrible year for my health was followed by a bad year for my health. So I am making a very deliberate decision to take a very long rest.

There is a bit more to it, too. I can’t think of anything I would like to work on. I am flat and unmotivated. I can’t come up with a project that interests or excites me.

But resting is surprisingly painful. Resting is hard work, fighting against a very strong pull to feel worthwhile. At this stage, I have quite a lot my self-worth and self-identity built up on being someone who gets to the studio regularly and makes some art.

So in this re-think that my body and my life are forcing on me, I hold myself to go out with my sketchbook to paint and draw somewhere beautiful every single Wednesday. To just relax into it, and not try to turn it into ‘work’ art.

And these old roses are growing in a quiet old graveyard close to my house, it’s Wednesday, so here I am, week after week, struggling to stay here.

Trying too hard to rest

I notice that I am forcing myself to constantly draw, to work with determination through sets of exercises: a blind drawing, followed by a negative space drawing, etc etc. And my resistance and tiredness is increasing not decreasing.

I don’t think I have quite got it right yet.

So I take on the advice made famous by Neil Gaiman (I have heard this advice many times before, but most people giving it make it sound like torture. Gaiman makes it sound relaxing, and I think there is a key in that). I am allowed to sit here and not work. I can write in my journal if too many thoughts come up, and I can draw only if I want to draw more than I want to sit there and do nothing. (I do have one teeny rule to get out my pencil and do a scribble drawing on a page first. This breaking of the ice seems to be a critical stage to help a drawing session flow out if it wants to). No phone, of course.

It turns out, this is the perfect advice.

I sit and watch the insects for an hour. I watch the leaves blow in the wind. I follow the shapes of trees and buildings slowly, just looking. Quite often I draw. Quite often I don’t.

The moral of this story does not match my intent

Now, this story asks to be ended with a moral point in line with my intention. It asks to be ended with me finding peace in drawing simply for the sake of drawing, to realise that being here, in the moment is the only thing I really need.

But I get a different ending to the story, a different moral.

One day while I am sitting here a new project floats together in the sunlight. Quickly, peacefully, the various art ideas that had been separate, itchy, irritating parts melded together to create a new form.

I know I can work again.

Why does sit and do nothing work?

It turns out there is a dopamine hack to this sitting and doing nothing - except draw (or write) protocol .

To Do Nothing increases your sensitivity to dopamine. Most of our day is spent seeking out dopamine, the motivational drug our brains serve up. All that scrolling jacks your dopamine, giving you constant hits. But even when we are not on our phones, we will seek out dopamine hits from completing defined tasks. I was getting a dopamine hit from the satisfaction of completing my tax return. From clearing out my inbox.

You know that time you tidied the house instead of doing the thing? That wee bit of satisfaction from folding a pair of socks and putting them away - that was a dopamine hit.

The trouble is getting our dopamine hit from our creative work is not as straight forward as it is from folding socks. We know we will make crappy drawings, get stuck in difficult passages, not know what to do next. And there is zero dopamine in that.

And for most of us, the feedback of approval from others is SO distant or weak that I for one certainly can’t rely on it for any sort of a dopamine rush.

Doing Nothing gives us no dopamine at all. So we are withdrawing from our intense dopamine addiction, and that is painful.

Eventually it actually works! Sitting and doing nothing breaks the pattern of over-stimulated dopamine cycles, takes us into dopamine cold turkey. And that withdrawal means we tune in more carefully to the delicate reward we get from doing our work. To becoming much more sensitive to the gentle delight of putting marks on paper, of becoming more in tune with our world and the creation of something new beneath our hands.

Experimenting, learning, and finding things out is so much more fun than trying to aim for some number - a number that may well have been inspired by a feeling of inadequacy and failure and self judgement.

Goals tap in weak, transient motivations. Those external ones. If a goal is measurable, by necessity it will veer in the direction of money over mastery, adulation over autonomy. And those will push me in the wrong direction in my life.

It’s the intrinsic, internally generated motivation that really move us in good directions over time.

And how can being a good  artist ever fit into a measurable goal? Nothing about actually getting better as an artist can be measured.

But there are questions that keep recurring, keep wanting answers. So that’s how I  approach a new year now - with looking at the questions that are important to me and responding with new experiments to test answers to those questions.

Goals are fragile, but questions and experiments are robust, anti-fragile

Like -  How can I make art that expresses what I want it to, more and more clearly and more beautifully too?

And although I know I will not solve that one, it is the work of generating new answers to good questions, and then testing them out in painting or drawing- that is the work that I love, and want to focus on.

The other big question that comes up every year is some version of ‘How can I do my studio work to make good art, fully experience the studio joy and also have enough resources (energy, time, money) to live a full life outside the studio as well?’

Figuring out, going over what worked last year, what didn’t work, comes first in the process. Then I design an experiment to test a new, hopefully more effective protocol to bring me good time in the studio.

In 2023, my experiment was to test 150 days of concentrated art making, followed by rest and consolidation for the other 200 days. (Included in that 200 days was a huge journey to Sumatra, Indonesia for my son’s wedding and I was also going through a bitter period of long covid and associated health problems, just in case that sounds lazy to your ears).

An artist I knew always did a big 100 day art project and then returned to her every day life and it seemed to work for her. Maybe it would work for me.

I wanted to test these assumptions:

1:

That I would be able to fully sink into a satisfying art making obsession on those allotted 100 days, knowing that there would be time later in the year to deal with normal life and administration stuff. Therefore I wouldn’t feel guilty about letting the rest of the world drift away while I was absorbed in painting.

2:

On the off-art days, I wouldn’t resent the time spent on business and life things, the way I normally do, knowing that I had already given my all to the art. I anticipated feeling fulfilled and satisfied as a result of this deep immersion in art. I would then also have the time to recuperate and recover in the off-art time that my health really needed.

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I need to tell you - I am counting this as a failure.

During the 150 art days, the world remained ignorant of my plans and life kept on stubbornly happening in all sorts of ways, despite my intention that it should not.

And the world continued to remain important to me; I did not want to ignore everything.

But worse, more destructive, was the state of my mind during the off-art days.

The other artist I was inspired by had an engaging day job the rest of the year. Me, I don't have something like that.

My mind seemed to chew itself up without an art project going on - a self-generated art problem to solve, one designed by me and for me, to perfectly delight me.

Perhaps  what was happening in my mind  was my default mode network  was left without this good sort of problem to happily mulls over while I am walking, doing the dishes, showering, gardening.

This default mode network is a mental network that keeps working away without our conscious control, whenever we are not actively, purposefully focused on a particular task. This default network goes over and over all the things rattling around in your life, making associations and connecting all the various disparate bits and bobs stored in our minds. It seems we spend about 30% of our lives with this rich, barely conscious process going on.1

Whatever problems and questions you have going on in your life will engage this process, this network of thought. And it will generate new ways of approaching the problems and questions while you garden, or walk, or shower.

When I am making art, the art itself keeps generating new and fascinating problems. And I think this default mode network keeps on generating new and interesting ideas and solutions. That’s fun!

But without these art problems to turn to, my default network starts to consume itself,  turning to anything to chew endlessly over. But now it has to turn to stupid things. To ruminating on pointless problems, inventing problems, going over incidents in the past, exaggerating and awfulising everything in my life.

I need to have a beautiful problem to turn my mind to.

Without time making art, I only have boring, unpleasant problems.

This year I am conducting a new experiment. How can  I work in flow every week of the year as a way of integrating my art and energy?

Flow is so delightful, and it’s what we all adore in our lives.2

Sounds good, doesn't it? I think it’s going to be such an exciting experiment. I’ll let you know how it’s going after I have run it for a while - we could all do with more flow in our lives, I think.

Although last year’s life/work experiment didn’t have the best results for me, I did have good art questions to answer, about colour and pigment and presence.

I have mapped out the material results of the 2023 experiment below, all the finished art I made, shown at scale, for you to see here.

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I thought when I made the decision to be an artist, all I would have to do was this.

Well, I do have to make art.

But I found my life was turning into this

So to be an artist, making space from the things turned out to be as important as making the art.

Instead of calling the things a ‘horrible list of annoying to-dos’, I renamed it…

Make Space For Art

That changed my mission from getting through the horrible list into eliminating and simplifying all the things on the list so I had space for art.

.

Make Space

Making Space in Myself

I need to make space in myself so I believe making art is something I can and should be doing.

Of course, the brain provides all the thoughts about how useless and deluded I am to believe that.

Getting past these thoughts and into the studio, used to mean just rushing in, pushing past them and slam into the studio as quickly as I could so their cruel hooks couldn’t sink in before the joy of making took over.

Now I take a lot more time, working through all the thoughts with attention, uncovering and releasing the underlying fears more thoroughly, and slowly building better thoughts.

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Making Space in my Energy

I need to try and step away from overwhelm and exhaustion. It sucks to come into the studio already worn out and frazzled. Making art takes lots of decision-making, and they should be really good decisions you are making in the studio. (Because thats how you make really good art)

Paying attention to simplifying everything else in life helps. Simplifying the clothes you wear, the food choices you make. That eliminates so many trivial decisions and allows for lots of art in your life.

Using a good efficient way of corralling, collecting (and winnowing down) all the tasks is a divine necessity too.1

(footnote) Cal’s systems work for the more linear thinkers - for the jumpy live-wire ADHD thinker, Andy J.Pizza’s podcast here is perhaps a good one.

Make Physical Space

Honouring the time I have carved out and finding the physical space that I need to make art in -both of these are huge, continuous struggles!

Make Art

I think you’ve got this bit, you’ve probably figured out your own amazing way of making art. Or at least you are enjoying the journey to get there.

Make a Vehicle to Take your Art out into the World where it can create an exchange of value

Because I always felt bad and scared about taking my art out into into the world to show other people, my art would just pile up. It became dispiriting to make art that would just go into a cupboard.

I have slowly and painfully come to this thought: When you create art, you are creating energetic beings in the world.

You can sense this energy in cave drawings, in the precious religious icons from the Byzantium, in the powerful wooden totems and masks created in Africa (which had their spiritual meaning stripped away by the Cubists).

in issue 28 of Dear Doris

These energetic beings you are creating need a place in the world - they need some pathway to go out and find their way into other human’s hearts, and create value to the world there. (footnote - some just have little bit of energy, like an ant, some much bigger).

Unless you have had a great deal of luck sometime in your life, you are the one who has to create this vehicle so your art can travel on this path.

And if this pathway of exchange is in place, the humans who have received value from your art can give you back the value you need in your life.

The value they return to you might be money. Or it might be respect. Or it might be this acknowledgement, that they have been moved by, and felt the same feelings you are expressing in your art. A kind of communion. Or all of these.

in is it ok to hate stuff for no reason?

I think of creating this business of taking your art out into the world to exchange value as creating a kind of boat, or sea vessel for your art

There are so many types of ship that one of them is sure to fit with your way of being in the world. And the strength of the visual metaphors works so well for me, and makes it easier for me to think through what its right for me:

A friendly inter-island ferry for transporting plenty of smaller, frequently made bits of art back and forth in a warm fug.

A luxurious super yacht for incredibly exclusive things.

A tough, knocked-up small fishing vessel that is 100% for locals, to provide nourishment for the few close to you.

A yacht for soloists to explore new territories, to go beyond the horizon. Not always coming back to shore, the adventure can be so strong. But finding places no-one has been to before.2

The platforms, the body of the boat, are the venues to place your work in and offer them for an exchange of value.

These platforms are galleries, shops, art markets, websites and os on. Some art connects well with one of these platforms but not others. And different platforms bring back different types of value. Some platforms are more exclusive, and can bring you back offerings of respect. Some platforms are better for the exchange of money, but do not bring you any status.

The next part of constructing this vehicle is finding ways to propel it through the choppy waves and currents of the world’s attention. Because your work has to be seen by some people in order ofr it to create value in their hearts. Maybe it has to be seen by a lot of people before it finds the right attention (which is a scarce resource).

Figuring out what will best propel the particular art you have made, and what best matches your own particular energy and way of being in the world yourself, is very important work.

The energies of propulsion are things like advertising, or meeting and talking to people in real life, or social media-ing, or being written up in the art world. All of these provide extra energy for your art’s journey out there.

These are the sails, the motors, or the oars that give your vessel motion.

Advertising is a like using a motor - it gives you fast propulsion but drains your reserves quickly (reserves of cash, in this case).

A sail takes energy upfront to create, but gives you gentle propulsion for years afterwards with only nudging and upkeep from you. These are the things that are evergreen on the web, like articles that keep turning up when people search, or pins on Pinterest, or being featured in art books.

And the oars, the rowing? You don’t need much in the way of reserves to get started with oars (they are just some big sticks) but you need LOTS of continuous energy to keep moving with your oars. These are those social media sites that make you keep posting and posting and posting, always creating new material, always constantly responding. Wearing you out. And as soon as you stop all this high energy activity energy, your boat stops moving. (And you need to watch out that you are not some kind of serf, just moving Mr Zuckerberg’s boat forward rather than your own)

But you can get started and go places that way with only your own personal energy and not much cash.

So many artists don’t like - or struggle with - the thought of mixing business and art. for so many, it seems so be two things that aren’t right together.

It can feel so hard, or wrong, that artists maybe just have a rough raft as a vehicle for their art.

Maybe we can love our art a little bit extra, and build something beautiful for it to travel on.

2

I did not invent the boat analogy - and my understanding of the propulsion analogy was deepened by this book: Content chemistry : the illustrated handbook for content marketing by Andy Crestodina

I have always avoided putting any sketchbook work up on Instagram because the thought of it - and how effective the drawings will or won’t be at collecting likes - makes me agonizingly self-conscious, wrecking my ability to draw freely, badly, with abandon.

Substack seems like a different place, a place where showing the act of working through things visually makes sense, fits in.

But now that I am putting one up, how much happier I would be if every spread worked beautifully! But drat, that’s the point of the workbook.

There are a couple of struggles going on in this workbook (Hahnemühle A5 Nostalgie, which has smooth, rather yellow paper and takes water media quite well).

The first problem was having was having too many sketchbooks on the go at once and not drawing in any of them. I solved that by rethinking my rules for workbooks, and this book has several drawings cut and pasted from unloved abandoned sketchbooks in it as part of my set of new rules.

The second struggle has been almost constant since I have been making art. I love drawing from direct observation, particularly plants and flowers. There is some sort of transformation of the mind that happens when you enter into this observation fully - a mindfulness that is stronger and more powerful than meditation (at least for me).

Yet I am constantly excited by working through quite abstract, non-representational ideas in paint or ink. When I find a new idea through process exploration, I am obsessed.

But by the end of this sketchbook, I am getting a glimmer of a way to work through observing plants, and exploring the space created by the line on the page at the same time.

So the work of the book, a container for my attention, and a way of bringing an awareness of that attention back to me later, has happened.

I have pasted work from the New Zealand artist Heather Straka in my workbook, as well as the late Mark Adams

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Right now I am navigating a big change in how I work. It can be quite painful to put aside something that was working, but no longer does.

So I am going deeper into past transitions to see what worked, and what didn’t work, hopefully easing this current phase change.

Fascination - Chaos

It's 2010, and I am in love with chaos theory. The world has shifted on its axis, and revelation after revelation is opening up the structure of this universe to me.

The vision is all so brilliant - the simple interactions between agents in a system creating sophisticated, resilient patterns of behaviour - patterns that appear magical or designed by a higher power - can be parsed, thought about, and occasionally manipulated, if you can see the systems.

And I see them everywhere. The systems become visible to me, lighting up tracks around me, creating family structures, financial collapses, and landslides on the banks of rivers. Without intent, without teleological effort; all arising from simple repeated interactions of agents - entities within the systems.

Drawing Out

I was drawing a lot at the time, too. Often, these soothing, repetitive lines would appear in my work.

I would draw a line, and then repeat the line. But each successive line slightly exaggerated the natural bumps and waves that a hand-drawn line has, the slight shaking and blotting. And then, I would exaggerate that line slightly on the next repetition.

Shapes and waves would emerge, and then distinct forms. One line would respond in a simple way to the line before it. And corals, leaves, amoebas, canyons, and dunes would emerge from that interaction.

The process itself created the results, not my own decisions about what I should draw. And it all felt as if I was co-creating with the systems as a partner.

The initial conditions of each drawing as a system were laid down by the first line - a box, a straight line, or a circle. With the tiny flaws in that first line, too. The shaking of my hand, the curvature of my wrist, blots from the ink in the dip pen.

Not knowing how the drawings would turn out kept me fascinated.

And I loved the question of what exactly I was doing, creating an algorithm for myself to draw with, a rule for drawing. A machine could easily follow the same rules, so how was it meaningful for me to draw in this way, algorithmically? How was what I was making different from what a machine would make?

One of the answers to that was that a machine would need flaws, blots, and shakes programmed into it, in order to make similar art. My frail, flawed human system provided all the glitches necessary to create the initial condition.

From where I am now, undiagnosed autism is at play here too. My brain-mind focuses on algorithms and patterns much more strongly than most people. The repetitive, wave-like lines too, are a stim, dramatically soothing and calming me.

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Stop

And there came a time when I got stuck, suddenly stopped. The excitement of making the drawings dropped away in a crash. It became too easy for me to predict what would happen in the drawings - the excitement was gone.

Chaos theory had settled peacefully in my mind. I still see emergent patterns and complex systems everywhere, but I experience them as the normal way the world works. No longer a bright light illuminating everything I see.

Physically, I was suffering a bit too. The repetitive strain injury (RSI) that has plagued me since my twenties flared up again - deliberately engaging in very repetitive drawing practice like this was taking a toll.

Be Seen

But I also felt this desperation and the need to be seen as an artist. These drawings were beginning to create that for me. And working to get seen, to be recognized, is nearly always a slow, slow process. Or at least a lot slower than I actually wanted! Staying with one style of art making smooths this path to success. If your work is largely similar from one year to the next, people have a mental hook to hang you on. They like art style A, your name becomes associated with art style A, and the network effect is able to take place. Connections between your name and style A build up, become denser. As long as you stick with style A.

I could see the start of this process happening. And my needy, needy self loved it.

So I kept pushing myself to make more and more of the emergent drawings.

Phase Change

In chaos theory terms, I underwent a phase change: a sudden and dramatic shift from one stable state (of delighted obsession) to a completely different stable state. The art world, I think, I believe, doesn't appreciate the trajectory of this storyline.

A more comprehensible pattern of logical, well-thought-out 'developments' resonates with most of the world. These sudden and dramatic changes of obsessions that rock and lurch through my life do not.

But the triggers for these dramatic fascinations and dramatic drop-offs and switching of 'special interests' (oh how mild that word sounds, nothing like the blazing delight of my actual experience) are barely comprehensible to me as I pass through them. I just know that one day I am obsessed with something, the next day I am not. Without that transformative moment, some sort of growth in the main character's understanding, that is used as the crux for a narrative framework, I don't have a way of telling this story.

The loss of an obsession is an agonising loss in itself, without the difficulty of explaining it to yourself and the world. An obsession conjures up a reliably wonderful state of mind, a brain that is sparkling with delight. So you have to deal with that loss, as well as with the problem of adjusting your external persona. How do you tell people that the thing you have been pursuing with such intensity for years now means very little to you?

Obsessions are not neatly framed by well-understood narratives or storytelling tropes. I am often just embarrassed about the unusualness of my obsessions, their violent arrivals and disappearances, and that shame holds me back.

Perhaps I am just telling myself this, that people find it really odd. Perhaps they are fine with it. But they are not. I can see their responses.

But there is a thing too, when the owner of a story is telling that story with confidence and assurance, rather than shame and despair. People seem to respond to the story then, maybe even love the story.

However I feel about explaining the obsessions, I love my art most where I have been able to let these obsessions grip and move me, and the art that somehow holds the repetitive, soothing experience of a stim within it, too.

And thank you for reading, for letting me work through how to tell this story.

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I love keeping my inbox clear(ish) so I really recommend using the Substack app - I open it on my iPad and have a lovely selection of things to read and browse through - the app is available here:

Get more from Helen Reynolds in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

UPDATE 2026: Pinterest and Substack have both changed a lot since I wrote this. Whenever you are reading this, please do a quick check of current recommendations before following mine, things will have changed!

The biggest changes have been a) the success of Substack. No-one I talked to had ever heard of Substack when I wrote this, now everyone is on the platform. That means that being active on Notes is currently the easiest way to get people visit and subscribe to your Stack. There are new people on Notes all the time, and there is no friction to subscribing straight from Notes, unlike when people find you on Pinterest or Instagram or other platforms.

And b) Pinterest has changed direction and they are trying to be useful to larger e-commerce people, rather than the small maker/artist/author who is likely to be reading this post.

The other change is I am currently not putting my own Substack up on Pinterest! I took quite a long break from all posting everywhere and rather lost the consistency that Pinterest values.

I can't seem to understand Instagram, and I never understood Facebook. It's like an avalanche of small talk - on a global scale. The posts there appear to me as strange social postures, social performances that I just can't interpret. Here, on my part of the autism spectrum, those things just don't register in my brain.

I am capable of decoding and replicating them, though. It's as if I am watching a bird species doing a mating dance. I can see the codes they are using clearly - a hop here, spreading of the wing feathers there. But it doesn't translate to me actually feeling anything (such as wanting to mate) in the way the birds must feel when they see these dances.

Other people will feel something when they encounter these social signals - some sort of response will be triggered that is absent in me.

So trying to do normal social media feels to me like going out and hopping in the same patterns as the birds hop, spreading my arms out in an echo of their wings.

I may successfully replicate the movements, but those beings on the other side of the screen are only seeing me perform an odd sort of code; I am definitely not getting a signal to mate as a result.

My earnestly studied and mimicking patterns I perform on Instagram are all just hard work for me, and I am not sure my posts don't vibrate with the awkwardness of masking. When I put a fire emoji in a comment, it feels as genuine as if a bird has desperately pecked at the keyboard.

But back around 2012, when I was still puzzling over why people enjoyed this peculiar, cryptic form of interaction on Facebook, I got an invitation to join Pinterest and found, happily, I could get those signals clearly and experience a genuine response to them.

In those days, Pinterest had a chronological feed. I could watch and understand people’s visual obsessions blooming and fading. I could be a part of and contribute to the waves of images passing backwards and forwards, images we were all obsessing about at the same time, creating patterns and tides of visual delight. We could see, via pins, through each other's eyes for a while.

Because I was a bit of an early adopter and totally in love with pinning all day, I still get the benefits of that time I spent on the platform. There is one viral pin, a sculpture I made all the way back in 2015 - and that same pin has just got 161,600 views in the last 10 months. There is no way anything will last that long on Instagram!

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Pinterest and Substack Now

I have recently started Substacking and pinning the Stacks, and that's giving my Pinterest account an overly boost! Pinterest loves fresh pins - new images with new URLs to connect to - and Substacking regularly means I am creating lots of new URLs, new images, and new things to talk about, all of which add up to high-quality fresh pins. (This might be a mind-blowing fact, but Pinterest actually wants and rewards you for creating new, good-quality links outside of their platform.)

Substack now allows people to post their thoughts, ideas, and responses in a deep way, beyond the social posturing that happens on other platforms. And I am so relieved - I can now 'see' the people on this platform and communicate with them genuinely. My neurodivergent brain doesn't have to struggle to decode everything. It can focus on ideas, so Substack has allowed me to connect with people on the internet again.

The wonderful thing is that Substack and Pinterest can work brilliantly together to create a (relatively) non-addictive, (relatively) low-stress way of growing an audience.

Both platforms offer perennial, evergreen ways of having your content live forever on the internet, unlike the 12-hour lifespan of other platforms.

The rhythm of both platforms is in tune as well. Both recommend posting once a week. Peace!

And I have picked up some ways to use Pinterest over the years that I would like to share to help you grow. I mention Instagram below because, as an artist, that has been the main way of showcasing my work, but the points may also be valid for a number of other platforms.

Addiction to marketing on social media

One big problem I have with Instagram is that it makes you addicted to marketing, constantly ramping up how much content you have to create to please the algorithm.

Instagram needs a constant supply of fresh content to capture the attention of app users. So it needs to convince you, the creator, to work very hard adding more and more content to the platform, as you are the one generating this constant novelty. And they must manipulate you so that the type of content you add aligns with their mission of keeping people engaged within the app. If IG didn't succeed in making you, a creative person, addicted to putting many things on their platform for free, they would have a significant problem - no audience and no business.

At the same time, Instagram is reducing their usefulness to content creators. The short-form videos make it more likely for users to mindlessly scroll and less likely to engage with your content on a deeper level.

The other major issue is the ethical foundation of Meta's business. The more addicted you are, the more money they make from selling your data and your audience's data, as well as selling ads and enticing you to pay for features. It's not pleasant. And they seem to disregard the collateral damage caused (genocide in Cambodia? Self-harm in young women? Cambridge Analytica?), considering it unimportant.

Yes, I still have an Instagram account. Fortunately, it is starting to fade into irrelevance in my life.

Step Zero - an attitude shift to peaceful platforms

Pinterest is a non-addictive marketing platform. This is a good thing! But your brain will try to tell you to focus on IG (or your previous platform of choice) because your brain is used to and addicted to the dopamine you get from posting there.

So it is going to be really helpful to create a different mindset - a change away from making material for Instagram and repurposing it for Pinterest if you ever get around to it.

Instead, put your energy into creating pins. Create posts entirely for Pinterest first. And, as a sort of waste product from your pin creation, you will have created some vertical images and captions you can reuse for Instagram.

And instead of posting in real-time - and having all the thoughts about likes and comments jiggling up your equanimity - use an auto-scheduler to post for you and give yourself lots of lovely distance from the process. Meta’s own scheduler is good. Also, set yourself a time later in the day to respond to comments on your desktop, not your phone. Weirdly, it's less addictive to do that.

Turn off or mute notifications from Insta. I turn off mobile data for Instagram in my phone settings so I can't just jump on it when I am out. Others delete the app from the phone or use various blockers or focus settings.

Put the Pinterest app in the middle of your phone’s home page instead and open that if you feel an urge to look at nice images on a scroll. Again, weirdly, the Pinterest app is interesting for a few minutes, then it is really easy to close it down.

And turn the notifications up on Pinterest. I get a little banner on my home screen floating past. (I turn the badges off the app itself; that seems a bit shouty to me). So I see these constant signals that Pinterest is working away for me, which soothes my anxiety. Pinterest isn’t a place for chatting, so you never have to do anything about those notifications except absorb a little bit of happiness juice.

Step 1 - Claim your Thing

Actually, make sure you have a Pinterest business account first! Make a clear introduction of yourself and your thing on your profile.

Then, claim your existing website. This will help protect your materials - now naughty people can't just 'take' your images, pin them, and put their own links on the images to their thing. Pinterest has marked you as having first dibs on those images now that you have claimed that website. It helps Pinterest connect your materials to your website. By the way, people might already be pinning from your website that they like, and pins of your thing are already there. Having your website claimed helps Pinterest keep those points connected to you.

Note that you can’t claim your Substack on Pinterest if you have the typical substack address, the one that is yourtitle.substack.com . That’s because you won’t be able to upload the necessary HTML tag to the root directory - only Substack themselves will have access to that.

However, if you get a custom domain for your substack, you can claim the custom domain for Pinterest through the DNS records, which you will have access to.

Claiming your website differs a bit depending on how it is hosted, so I won't go into it here. This is the Pinterest page on how to do it. Claim Your Website

UPDATE: I HAVE ACTUALLY NOT SUCCEEDED IN CLAIMING MY SUBSTACK FOCUSED WEBSITE ON PINTEREST, ONLY MY MAIN PERSONAL WEBSITE. I AM RUBBISH AT THIS SORT OF DIGITAL STUFF, SO I DON’T KNOW IF IT IS ME OR IT IS NOT ACTUALLY POSSIBLE

Step 2 - Make four boards (or more)

Think of some contexts in which your thing will be happy. An artist might create boards called 'Abstract Paintings', 'Art Inspired by the Sea', 'Blue Interiors', 'Minimalist Interiors', and 'Art by My Name' for their boards. Someone creating a slow living Substack might choose 'Seasonal Slow Living', 'Simplify your Home', 'Quit Social Media', or something similar for their boards. Make sure to fill in the board descriptions as well as the board titles.

Now pin things you like to the boards. Have fun pinning things you find interesting and attractive. There is a small boost from the algorithm simply by being on the platform and pinning. And I believe you are more likely to gain followers if you have an interesting flow of pins. By the way, having followers is not very important on Pinterest. Views and Saves are what you want.

The algorithm also uses boards as context to determine the theme of the pins you create. So if your pin about Your Thing is in a board surrounded by pins about The Similar Thing in a board titled All These Things - and with a board description 'an interesting variety of lovely Things', it's all for the better. Now you are starting to master Pinterest SEO

Step 3 - Make the Pins

The next step is to pin all the things that are already on your website and make pins from Substacks you have already published.

This is the process:

1. Decide which web page or Substack post to make a pin for. Choose an image that connects well with that page. (You probably already have that, right?) and looks good. Make sure what people will find on the web page and what you have put on the pin match up. It is very important to Pinterest that their users find what they are looking for.

2. Don't link to posts that are completely behind a paywall. Pinterest likes its users to find what the pin has promised, and they can't if it is behind a paywall.

3. Pinterest will accept a variety of aspect ratios, but the best size is 1000px wide and 1500px high. If you already have a lot of photos in other vertical formats, and you feel overwhelmed by resizing them all, it's okay, you can still use them if you want. It's even possible to use horizontal images if you need to, but they don't look very good on Pinterest, so it's probably a bit of a waste of time to bother with them.

4. You can make either a static pin or a video pin. You used to be able to make something called Idea pins (actually my phone still shows me the Idea pin option, but they are just slow in phasing them out around the world), but now they have simplified it back down to static pins and video pins. Video pins do get better engagement on Pinterest, so use video if you have some good videos lying around.

5. It's often a really good idea to layer on words that will draw people in - but for my art, I like to keep the pin free of text. Nice-looking quotes work too.

6. Pinterest can read the words on a JPEG you have uploaded, especially if the font is clear. Sans serif bold helps here.

7. On Pinterest, upload the image. Add a clear, simple title. Add a description, using sentences in normal human language. Don't use hashtags. Add the URL from your website or Substack post that the pin connects to. Now you are getting even better at Pinterest SEO!

8. If you have a nice backlog of material on your website or existing Substacks, make a lot of pins and use the scheduling function to auto-post the pins out once a week into the future. Pinterest has a scheduler built-in, and Tailwind is the best third-party scheduler for Pinterest.

9. Once a week is a bit of a magic number for Pinterest. If you do that much, the algorithm knows you are a creator on their platform and, as a result, will treat you well.

Pinterest says, "Quality and relevance matter more than frequency on Pinterest. So while you can determine the best schedule for you, posting on a weekly basis is a good rule of thumb."

So long-term, it is better to pin once a week for a year than to pin five times a week and burn out after two months. Put your beautiful, precious energy into writing or painting, not making a million different pins! Don't burn out, please. Pinterest really isn't about the hustle hustle.

Step 4 - Fresh Pins every week

What Pinterest truly loves is a Fresh Pin. A Fresh Pin is one that has both a new image and a brand new URL to go to. Every post you make on Substack has a fresh URL, so if you post here once a week, you are sorted.

What to do if you don't create new Substacks that frequently? Create semi-fresh pins. That means having a new image connected to a pre-used URL. Maybe do a flat lay of your thing for one pin, and your thing hung on the wall for the next pin, both leading to the same URL. Even changing up the layout of the (same) text and (same) image dramatically will fool the algorithm into thinking you have delivered a new image. Some people really get into this remix and have a bunch of Canva templates to do this remixing with.

Look after your links. Once upon a time, I used to just change the titles of my website's pages constantly, willy-nilly, depending on what I felt like. But all the pins to the old pages become broken links, and Pinterest doesn't like that.

So I have learned to treat all my existing URLs like treasures and protect them forever, thanks to Pinterest.

For Substack, this has meant I have chosen a custom domain for my stack. There may come a day when I decide to leave Substack (but I hope not), and this means I can re-host my writing and still keep all the URLs (and the Pinterest link juice from them) forever.

Pinterest also notices domain authority. If your pins consistently lead to non-broken, good quality URLs, with good quality on the pages, Pinterest will reward you by ranking your domain authority well.

Step 5 - Just keep going once a week for at least six months

And stop there for 6 months - just pin once a week.

Pinterest is slow, and it will take time for things to grow on Pinterest.

So after six months, you might want to check in and see if some pins have performed better than others. See if you can do more of the things that are resonating with people.

See your audience via Pinterest -

When people have started pinning your content to their boards, you can go and see their boards. You get a lovely insight into where your content fits into people’s lives.

Look at this board where one of my posts is. I can understand quite a bit about what this woman likes and who she is by looking at her board.

I don't think you get anything like this type of insight anywhere else!

Analysing the statistics -

Look at your stats to see which pins perform better than others and use the information to create better pins.

Pinterest SEO

Now you can get even more geeky about Pinterest SEO too. There is a small universe for you to dive into if you want.

Pinterest Trends

Pinterest Trends is another refinement, another level of geeky stuff you can get into. Pinterest announces what is currently trending on their platform, and if your content matches one of the trends, you can make a play for riding the wave of that trend.

Start re-pinning strategically to different boards

This is the way to pin every day without creating new pins every day. After a period of, let's say, one month after creating a pin and posting it to a specific board, find another board and upload the same pin to that board. Using Tailwind will make this incredibly easy - they have an option that automates this for you.

Don't pin the same link day after day - mix up the pins in the schedule so that each day you post a different link. Mix it up so that you create a pin for post A and then one for post B.

Join Tailwind communities

Join communities that are downstream of your business. If you make butter, don't join a butter-makers community. Join a bread bakers community because they are the ones who are going to want to buy lots of butter. If you are an artist, don't join an art community, join an interior decorators community.

Some things to be aware of:

In the USA, during the summer, your numbers will drop dramatically. It's okay; it's just a pleasant indication that Pinterest is a non-addictive platform. People will have put down their devices and gone outside to play rather than staying inside, stuck on Pinterest. It's another good sign that Pinterest is a non-addictive platform.

Group boards can be a bit tricky. Leave them alone unless you have a special reason.

Outdated advice:

For a while, it was a great boost to your account to use Idea Pins (similar to an IG reel or story). Pinterest has since changed Idea Pins, and they no longer overtly say that they prioritize them.

If you go really old school, you might find advice to pin 20 times a day. They changed the algorithm ages ago, and you will be treated as spammy if you do this now. Don't do it.

Following Simple Pin Media is a good idea - they will keep you updated on Pinterest developments

And follow me on Pinterest if you like…

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I put on my black linen pants, a black jumper and a black polished cotton smock. I tie a string of black pearls around my neck.

I walk through the white rooms (milk white, that is, with a soft calcium carbonate pigment rather than the usual highly reflective titanium dioxide pigment) and out to my studio.

And I start painting out the strongest, brightest range of colours from three tubes of watercolour paint that I can.

The spectrum is a puzzle to solve for me, not just in terms of hue, but also in terms of pigments. In watercolour all of the different pigments have their own distinct material properties to be understood.

The earth pigments sink heavily in the watery puddles. Ultramarine breaks up into mottled clumps. Quinacridone dissolves completely, evenly, transparently. Phthalo stains1

That puzzle (maximum possible range of hues) is really best solved by phthalo blue, quinacridone magenta and azo yellow2, and so I had created a limitation for myself to use only those three pigments for several years now.

But now I know these pigments so well that when I paint, there are few surprises anymore.

And I love surprises, I love the adventure and the experiment.

So this year I had to find a new triad.

cerulean chromium + anthroquinoid red + indian yellow

The first triad that seemed to have promise was cerulean blue, anthroquinoid red and Indian yellow. I made a unit of lines testing out this new triad.

For me, every body of work is an experiment. I set up an hypothesis and the paintings are the tests. The resulting paintings might answer that question, or maybe just raise a completely new question.

Thats the reason all my titles are numbers; each painting is an instance in the experiment.

Results? Cerulean chromium blue has a charming hue but does not play well with others. It is very heavy, and just sinks precipitously in a wash - so subtle gradations are impossible to build up. Indian yellow is lovely and warm, but an unusually dominating yellow.

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prussian blue + quinacridone magenta + nickel azo yellow

The next triad to test out was Prussian blue, quinacridone magenta and nickel azo yellow.

Prussian blue was also reluctant to give variations in tone, but for different reasons. It has two states - either very light, or very very dark, when it completely dominated the paintings. I quite liked the results, but my aim was to make a whole group of paintings vibrating through the spectrum, and this triad wasn’t going to make it happen.

turquoise phthalo + quinacridone red + nickel azo yellow

So more research - and I choose turquiose phthalo, quinacridone red and nickel azo yellow to work with in 2023.

I loved the glow of the nickel azo yellow in particular. Every painting seemed like it had a drop of sun in it.

So I settled on the limitation of this triad and painted it out through twenty variations of colour.

Fifteen of these experiments will be making up a solo exhibition at Madsen Härdig Akvarallgalleri opening October 13th.

Madsen Härdig is a gallery specialising completely in watercolour, so it was wonderful to have an invitation to ship my experiments from New Zealand all the way to Madsen Härdig in Lund, Sweden and be part of their mission to show lovely watercolours to the world.

Those who are really interested in watercolour triads need to take a look at Jane Blundell’s work, she is the Queen of triads.

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Reading these in the Substack app is way better than reading it in your email inbox - and you will definitely find lots of other great reads there too

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Outside of New Zealand, you may not have heard of Rita Angus - she is New Zealand's best known woman painter, working in those difficult times for women artists, the 1930s-1960s. The house where she lived and painted is now an artist’s residence and I am a volunteer gardener there.

My own house is very close to the cottage. A composer who lived close by, very much admired - Douglas Lilburn - had a lifelong friendship and a sort affair with Rita. And Rita became pregnant. She was overjoyed, seeing a beautiful future family. But Lilburn was apparently not so happy. He was not the slightest bit interested in settling into a domestic situation. Then the baby miscarried and Rita was terribly bereft.

Every year the magnolia in the garden flowers profoundly, magnificently.

It’s quite a famous magnolia, Rita painted it quite a bit. That’s the magnolia in the background of this self portrait.

And its fatally ill, terminal. Honey fungus is consuming the tree from the inside, destroying the core of the tree.

The flowers just get more and more intense. It flowers with almost hysterical abandon. People are puzzled - why would a tree flower so much when it is dying? Shouldn’t it’s weakness be expressed by conserving energy and not flowering?

It is flowering so much because it is dying.

Trees expend all of their energy into reproduction, via flowers, with the last of their energy, as they die. This is it, there is no future except through flowers.

A younger, more vigorous tree will put a chunk of its energy into growing. So it doesn't flower as much as a dying tree, a tree with nothing left to put its energy into except immortality.

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I get scared of death a lot. So now I see myself in Rita’s garden, with my fingers buried in the earth. My hands are in the soil and the soil is the bodies of tiny insects and plants. I am holding the stuff of death. I see those tiny insects eating the plants and the plants dying. I can see more plants growing up in the sunshine in the space they have left. I hold onto this thought of the death of plants and know its good, it’s okay.

I shift my perspective and I see the birds eating all the insects, and the birds dying in the garden. And I hold this thought until it is okay again. I hold the insects eating the bird’s bodies, and the plants growing from the birds bodies and I see the flowers we have planted growing bigger and more lovely.

I see all the plants growing without us, the gardeners. How all the growth here is not the result of our work, but is working without us, in spite of us, beyond us. How we can only just guide a shoot here and there, pull away another bit of plant growth there, and how all the work we put in is nothing really but makes a garden somehow.

Matter aggregates, into something beautiful . And then it disaggregates

I never really got beyond birds in my death visualisation - it is still hard to face death, hard.

I think I am making art because of death, too. I aggregate matter into something beautiful. I only started working seriously, properly, in my forties. I realised I was the same age as my mother was when she became too ill to work properly in her life. I was in danger of not trying to do my work here until it was too late, until I had no more chances left. This is it, there is no future except through the flowers.

More on Rita Angus here and here

I think getting the Substack app is a great idea- there are so many great writers on Substack. Reading great writing on the app is completely replacing my doom-scrolling habits. And the app is a good place to read it all, much better than in your emails.

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Rules I accidentally created about drawing in my workbooks

1. I have to draw or write in the sketchbook so that drawings are in a linear order - time must not be disjointed in my workbooks. So if I have two current workbooks going, I can never draw in either of them because drawing in one will automatically mess up the time line in the other workbook. Therefore I must not draw.

2. I have to separate planning & writing from drawing. Therefore I cannot open my journal to put things init as they occur to me, as I almost certainly have brought the wrong type of workbook with me. Therefore I must not draw.

3. My workbook has to be the perfect size and the perfect shape with the prefect paper. If it isn’t perfect, I will probably get angry with it and stop drawing in it and throw it away. So I better not start drawing in it, that would obviously be a waste of time if I am going to throw it all away anyway. Therefore I must not draw.

4. Some drawings are just so super sketchy - just warming up drills or exercises, not even proper drawings and shouldn’t go into a workbook. So I will never improve my skills through doing plenty of bad, doodley, sketchy drawing. Therefore I will never make the perfect drawings I would prefer to see in my workbook. Therefore I must not draw.

5. If I do manage to make a good drawing in my sketchbook, I will be able to feed the Instagram beast with it. So I never relax while drawing and I am always thinking ‘will be good enough to post?’ and my skin is crawling with exposure anxiety as I try to draw. So it is completely logical to avoid drawing and avoid that horrible feeling. Therefore I must not draw.

But I want to have a sketchbook because because I want to spend a lot of time drawing. Looking at the world with this sort of concentration changes my brain in ways I like very much (and it improves my drawing).

So I need new rules about workbooks, and frame them up as experiments - experiments that will fail.

So now each sketchbook is an experiment I am conducting on how to: change my vision, change my skills, creating drawing habits.

Or an experiment in: when to draw, how to work, what paper I want to work on, what size I want to work on.

Or an experiment in what to draw, what medium I want to use, what colours I like.

Did I say the phone wrecks sketchbooking? All those moments in coffee shops or waiting for something, which used to be sketch book moments, are gone. The immediate pleasures of sketch booking are weak, weak dopamine hits compared to the sledgehammer of phone dopamine. But oh my dear, the long term joy of being present while you are drawing! The satisfaction of growing and growing the rare and valuable skill of drawing! And the satisfaction of going over your sketch books years later, when you are 61, and watching your past self fight and struggle to overcome all the things and just draw.

To re-grow my sketch book life, I am setting myself a certain number of pages to fill in a week. And I am allowed to just stick something in my book, that counts as work. A scribble counts. Everything counts, and nothing matters.

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New rules about workbooks

1. Every sketchbook will be a failure, because they all are anyway.

2. I will be carrying a Traveller’s Notebook in my bag every day. It will always be the wrong size (far too narrow) and imperfect and I am just going to keep drawing in it till the end of the year even though it is imperfect.It is also a pain to open up and start drawing in, because it needs multiple clips in order to lay flat. But it does work have seperate inserts, one for planning and one for drawing, so I always have the exact type of book I want to work in with me, even when they are always exactly the wrong size.

3. And keep a Hahnemule Nostalgie hardcover workbook for drawing in the studio. It does have the right paper for me and opens flat beautifully. The time line will not be perfect!

4. Watch out for your phone. Your phone has obliterated boredom and strangled inspiration.

5. Any workbooks that die from lack of attention will be disemboweled and pasted into the studio workbook.

6. Photos of the insides of my workbooks will NEVER be posted on Instagram (OK, except after 5 years or something). The poison of feeling my workbook is a place where I have to meet the approval of a selfish algorithm and the passing fancies of addicted scrollers will not be ingested by me.

However, I feel fine about putting photos from sketchbooks on Substack. Instagram feels like a declarative platform - Look at me! I did this! And the putting up of a shiny surface to be judged.

Whereas Substack feels like a place where people are exploring; exploring what they are thinking about, where their interests lead them now. And the interiors of workbooks interiors fit right in with that.

The line I paint here is glitchier than I want, less even, less strong. Maybe you can see my pain in it, and my ease.

When performance anxiety hits, people will make work that is estimated to be only 60% as good as their practice work, work they make when they are alone with no expectations, instead of the times when this is it, and you have to do it right - now, this one time. The All Or Nothing time.

I like to escape those maladaptive thought clusters of performance anxiety by repeating and repeating the lines I paint over and over. Eventually the ‘practice’ lines and the ‘performed’, final lines blur into a single state of presence in my mind.

First I paint the same up-then-down line on smaller, cheaper pieces of paper. Try and make each one as perfect as I can, no matter what paper it is on, no matter what size. Then move up paper size, making more and more until the moments flow into one another and everything in my world is just the paper, the brush, the ink.

And I have another tactic for sidestepping performance anxiety that I use when I am about to paint a really large line for a competition or an exhibition. A different repetition tactic.

Large lines are maps of risk. A wobble or hesitation or stumble and an entire roll of paper is off to the recycling. But more than that, more important than the risk of wasting the materials, wasting my time and energy is the risk of one line as a piece of art. This is just one line. And I want it to take up a massive amount of space. And I want to ask a lot of money for it too. And everything can go wrong.

So my cheat, my usual way of making it past the choke inducing thought “this is it, it’s all or nothing in these next three minutes I have with the enormous piece of paper and this ink and this brush and my flawed, inadequate self” is repetition. I aim to paint four lines at the full scale, so I know for sure none of these lines is It, the all or nothing line. There is another chance to get it right, and that chance is in the editing. The choosing of which of those four lines is going to be good enough to make it to the exhibition. This neatly separates that weight of performance anxiety from the moment of action. Now it is delegated to editing time. And it is an effective way of dealing with performance anxiety - making sure you are not judging yourself while you are making. Let judging have it’s own, seperate time.

This line at the top of this post, White #3.4.1: Pain & Ease is different. It is 2.5 meters long and is my entry to New Zealand’s top drawing prize, The Parkin Prize.

Because I have had long covid for a year (I am better now- it’s an interesting story and worth it’s own post later). So I am shocked by how stiff and weak my body is after 12 months of being barely able to move. Long COVID has been followed by frozen shoulder, horribly debilitating for an artist. My right arm can only move a few degrees in any direction. Painting these big lines is a full body practice used to involve doing hours of hot yoga as essential to my art, to giving me control over the smooth waves of the brush.

But now I can hardly lean over the paper. Moving the heavy boards and paper rolls just to set up the space means I have to lie down for hours. I have done some warm up lines but there is no way I have enough strength in me to set up the paper for four full scale lines, never mind actually painting them.

So my option is to paint just one line and decide to submit that, no matter what.

I am using a different method of dealing with performance anxiety. That is really just living with who I am now, and accepting what my body can make now, in its very very flawed way. Stepping away from judging myself and from judging the line I paint.

One white line only

In the video of myself painting, I can see myself shuffling lumpily where I used to glide. I can see my muscles in my bad arm bunched up and rigidly curled as I drag the brush.

So it is a different kind of being in the moment I am using now. It is not the transcendent type of being in the moment I look for, I want, I love. But it is an embodied being in the moment - being where I am now, in an older, sicker body. A flawed and finite body. Being where I am now - and not loving it - but accepting it. All and nothing.

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Some people can just make emotions so clearly felt through their voice, and Steve Marriot was one of those people. Does it seems like there were more of those singers in the sixties? Or is it just me? Here is All or Nothing by The Small Faces. such a good song.

Indonesian women will add a special, secret herb or bark to the indigo ferment, drawn from the offerings made to the ‘owners’ - the spiritual beings of the land and the plants. These secret ingredients are passed down only from mother to daughter. If the chain of reproduction is broken, or separated, the secrets are gone. The secret ingredient can differ according to the ceremonial use the finished fabric will be used for. The fabrics are gifted or exchanged in weddings, births and funerals.

Light indigo blue is hard to get even - we carefully dip our scoured fabrics slowly slowly into the indigo vat - we are trying to avoid stirring up the indigo liquid and oxidizing it. Then under the liquid, we carefully and slowly rub each centimeter or fabric between our fingers so the dye soaks into the threads evenly. Then lift the fabric gently gently up into the air to oxidize - and watch the colour work it’s way from warm beige to greenish to indigo blue, reacting to the atmosphere. Squeeze out as much liquid as we can and dip again. Every dip makes the fabric go a little bit bluer.

Our teacher asks us to go through this slow routine again and again, to loose count of how many times we have dipped the fabric, just dip and dip again. The vat is steamy and warm, we listen to frogs and insects in the tropical garden, we listen and talk to each other, women working on textiles together. The conversations are loose and gentle.

Some are impatient. Why can’t we just use a stronger mixture and get a good strong blue now? Because those who dye are not the impatient ones, we are told. If you can’t find peace and happiness in dipping and rubbing your fabric over and over again, being here with the aroma and the steam and the feeling of fabric under your hands, dyeing is not for you.

The colours we learn about and dye with are: indigo, jackfruit tree yellow, mangrove bark brownish red (Ceriops), and a blackish grey from mud.

And this is how you make the mud dye (you will need to make two. Mixtures to alternately dip your fabric in, a tannin mix and a mud mix. Oh and of course a mordant, but I won’t go into that. You need to go out and collect a particular fallen leaf from a certain part of the forest in Flores Island for the mordant).

The tannin mixture should be from a plant that has a nice soft tannin. Garlic tannin is the best. Avocado leaves also have a nice weak tannin that is suitable. Woodfordia fruticosa can work too - collect a kilo of the tannin plant, add 20 litres of water. Boil, strain and leave to mature for a month.

Dig in a rice paddy to get your mud. But the first 20cm of mud is no good. It will have too much organic material in it, little bits of plants and animals. Beneath that, the mud is good. So dig your hole nice and deep to collect your mud.

Add enough water so it is all a nice milky texture, strain and leave to settle for a day. Pour off the water that has separated up.

Now add bran and the fermenting of your mud will start. In the morning, take your mud and bran outside into the warmth and stir it up well. In the evening, take it back inside to shelter. After five days of this, you should be able to start seeing a rusty colour coming through and you can start to dye with it.

How much colour has meant to us, how very important colour is in our lives! How much work humans will go to to bring colour into their lives! Because making the mud dye was the easiest of all the dyes to make that we learnt about.

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Threads of Life in Bali does an incredible work with women weavers of Indonesia, just look at this beautiful ikat weaving -

The best book about how massively important textiles (and always women’s work) has been in creating our culture:

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years

by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Totally worth digging in to.

And this brought up the memory of a beautiful song, Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls: