​I have been writing children’s fiction for a while now, but then one dark and stormy night, it occurred to me that I had other things to say which did not come under fiction. These other things I have to say came under a completely different category than the fantasy-thriller for young adults. I would hazard a guess that it is probably more personal than any story. It is some of the insights, learnings and understanding that I have acquired in my life-journey and which makes me - me.

​As it is Christmas and coming up to New Year, when typically most people think it is a time to make new resolutions, to create a possible new game plan for themselves, make changes to their life, make changes to their bodies, make changes to their mental perspective. Typically we do these things to improve our life, typically we wish to nudge it closer to the life that we think we should be living, and mostly aspirationally speaking, closer to our inner dreams for ourselves.
 
So onto the self-help book available in kindle now, and in paperback in the new year.
 
I have always been interested in the mad world of adults where rational decisions often seemed to be made irrationally, or at least so it seemed to me as a child. This curiosity turned into more than an interest when I not only noticed that most adults behaved this way, but I did too.
 
It was a desire to escape from my pre-ordained destiny that set me on the path to search for something that works in helping me avoid it. On a personal level, I don’t wish to lie on a psychologist’s couch and have the ‘techniques’ applied to me when if ‘one can be truly honest with oneself’, you will find the gifts within that truth and honesty all by yourself.
 
This I can do. Anyway that works for me.

Ones personal truth is always mute – when it is truly expressed it is communicated in silence – and if one really has to speak what results is the translation of that silence into pictures, music, dance and other creative acts – personal, social and institutional.

Every dream is a plan that lends itself to enactment in the outside world, behind every enactment in the outside world there is a dream – or a picture, a note, a movement a thought, an idea – or perhaps something that is only waiting to be discovered. 
​
Keats said – that which is creative must create itself. Creativity arises from itself, you can’t learn it, explain it, teach it – it comes upon one and creates stillness and a presence where the images and colours take on a life of their own. One becomes obsessed by it and it is creates an urgency and demands that have to be satisfied, one cannot avoid it, it has to be done.

​Getting in touch with the imagination and the little people (internal objects) that inhabit it is rather like dreaming, the images are able to do as they please, one has to trust the voices, the images, and the sounds and allow them to come from themselves and not control what you want them to say. It is like a dream, one is always a player in a group, sometimes an observer and at other times taking command. Other people in the group are also of value. So what comes first in a painting may not be the final image, as one has to allow other images to speak for themselves. This may involve destroying what has initially been created to allow creativity to reform itself and to recreate itself. In painting a picture this process can go on, over and over again, so that one learns that the act of creation is also one of destruction. The creator and the destroyer work hand in hand. One has to learn to live with that tension.
​
The painting is a mirror that reflects who one is at a moment in time, the images and colours form the archetypal background to one's life and the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. The grid so to speak on which one is built, enabling one to battle with questions like chaos and control, black and white, dark and light, creation and destruction, duality and unity – the unification of opposites. These questions flow from out of the paint into being itself, so the work is both meditation on life and a meditation where paint becomes an extension of psyche: one’s battle with one’s soul.

Ones personal truth is always mute – when it is truly expressed it is communicated in silence – and if one really has to speak what results is the translation of that silence into pictures, music, dance and other creative acts – personal, social and institutional.

Every dream is a plan that lends itself to enactment in the outside world, behind every enactment in the outside world there is a dream – or a picture, a note, a movement a thought, an idea – or perhaps something that is only waiting to be discovered. 
​
Keats said – that which is creative must create itself. Creativity arises from itself, you can’t learn it, explain it, teach it – it comes upon one and creates stillness and a presence where the images and colours take on a life of their own. One becomes obsessed by it and it is creates an urgency and demands that have to be satisfied, one cannot avoid it, it has to be done.

​Getting in touch with the imagination and the little people (internal objects) that inhabit it is rather like dreaming, the images are able to do as they please, one has to trust the voices, the images, and the sounds and allow them to come from themselves and not control what you want them to say. It is like a dream, one is always a player in a group, sometimes an observer and at other times taking command. Other people in the group are also of value. So what comes first in a painting may not be the final image, as one has to allow other images to speak for themselves. This may involve destroying what has initially been created to allow creativity to reform itself and to recreate itself. In painting a picture this process can go on, over and over again, so that one learns that the act of creation is also one of destruction. The creator and the destroyer work hand in hand. One has to learn to live with that tension.
​
The painting is a mirror that reflects who one is at a moment in time, the images and colours form the archetypal background to one's life and the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. The grid so to speak on which one is built, enabling one to battle with questions like chaos and control, black and white, dark and light, creation and destruction, duality and unity – the unification of opposites. These questions flow from out of the paint into being itself, so the work is both meditation on life and a meditation where paint becomes an extension of psyche: one’s battle with one’s soul.

LiterArties vision unites us. Each of us is 'Capturing our Creativity' through many modes and mediums. Change is a feature of every moment and as creative people we strive to 'capture' the essence of  a moment, or moments, in our transient lives using our 'creativity' in words, images, music, clay,... any vehicle possible. Not only is this creative process very rewarding, but through it we can share our inner worlds and experiences with others, hopefully to make their life more pleasurable as well. 

Naturally we can explore our creativity through individual mediums, such a writing a book or taking a photograph, but mixing up mediums to convey our inspiration as an integrated whole is a wonderful challenge.

​"Among those in the know, Maeve Bayton is something of a local hero, or, rather, heroine. She has a long and distinguished musical record in Oxford, fronting the city’s first all-girl band, 'The Mistakes', in the ‘70s, while her second band, 'Jane Goes Shopping', were also a regular fixture. She remains a respected blues artist, has lectured on music at Ruskin and written on the subject of women in rock. That experience comes through in her second solo album – a collection of sweet, whimsical folk moulded in the tradition of Joan Baez or Sandy Denny.

​Featuring only five tracks, each tune has space to breath, particularly on the title track, which weighs in at eight-and-a-half minutes long. And it is genuinely lovely and uncommercial.

Maeve’s heartfelt, pastoral songs, exploring sadness and loss are soothing, pastoral and, at times almost psychedelic in their simplicity and naivety. The title track even comes with a birdsong soundscape recorded at dawn near Maeve’s Otmoor home. The heartmelting lyrics, meanwhile, were written about her husband’s terminal illness.

The standout track is opener 'Missing You' – with Jane Griffiths’s dreamy Celtic fiddle. But really the record works as a whole. The beauty of the music, Maeve’s clear voice and the sparse instrumentation by Griffiths and guitarist Ian Wycherly lend it huge charm. Here is music to soothe most frayed of souls." (The Oxford Times Review, May 2013) 
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