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HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO FINISH A PICURE?

1/26/2022

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by ROSIE PHIPPS
Picture
In conversation with Rosie PhippsQU “How long does it take to finish a picture?”
​

ROSIE “Well, it depends. There are two ways of looking at it. Contemplation and action. Contemplation belongs to the inner man. Action is an extension of this inwardness. One needs to wait until one is possessed. It is like religion.A painting is not a painting until one is possessed. A religion which lacks possession is not a religion.”

QU “Are you saying that a religion is not a religion unless it has a technique of possession attached to it?”

ROSIE “Yes. A religion is like painting. It is something to be  experienced. This is why it is so uncomfortable to exhibit them. One is turning a private space into a public arena.”
John realised that what Frances painted showed both her pain and her pleasure. Was she, and were the pictures, crying out to be looked at and appreciated by others, or was the act of creation enough in itself?

QU “I listened to John Cage's  4. 33” at a concert last week. 4.3 minutes of silence. The pianist sat motionless at the piano.Her fingers outstretched and tense ready to play.The cellist raised his right eyebrow indicating to her that she should start. She sat there and did nothing. The cellist, reflecting her silence, sat  motionless again with his arms poised as if to strike the first note.”

ROSIE “ I know the piece. He is allowing us to  experience the silence as a composer, not just a listener.The room was filled with people some of whom were drawn into the silence. It felt like a cathedral. We were held in that state of being that perfect attention creates. ”

QU “Yes. He is allowing the audience to experience the power of silence. The possession, and the action that follows from the possession of silence, and from which compositions are made and played.”

ROSIE “ What Cage did was to take that private space into a public space. What the audience then did with it was up to them.”

QU “ Yes. The silence is there for us all.It comes and goes with one's awareness. One has to listen for it. It can come spontaneously when one is alone, or holding someone one loves, or just by walking in the woods. The point is to be able to recognise it.”

ROSIE “There are times in one’s life when one's inner state matches that of the world and there appears to be no way out.There is no starting all over again with a new beginning. One just has to start where one finds oneself, within that silence, and pick up the pieces and start all over again. With art there is always an empty canvas.”​

QU “What are you working on now?

ROSIE “The sensuality of the land. The sheer eroticism of it. It is like flesh. I want to stroke it.I want to grab and mould it.”
 

Recent landscapes by Rosie     250 x 105mm

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HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO FINISH A PICURE?

1/17/2022

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by ROSIE PHIPPS
Picture

In conversation with Rosie Phipps

QU “How long does it take to finish a picture?”
​

ROSIE “Well, it depends. There are two ways of looking at it. Contemplation and action. Contemplation belongs to the inner man. Action is an extension of this inwardness. One needs to wait until one is possessed. It is like religion.A painting is not a painting until one is possessed. A religion which lacks possession is not a religion.”

QU “Are you saying that a religion is not a religion unless it has a technique of possession attached to it?”

ROSIE “Yes. A religion is like painting. It is something to be  experienced. This is why it is so uncomfortable to exhibit them. One is turning a private space into a public arena.”
John realised that what Frances painted showed both her pain and her pleasure. Was she, and were the pictures, crying out to be looked at and appreciated by others, or was the act of creation enough in itself?

QU “I listened to John Cage's  4. 33” at a concert last week. 4.3 minutes of silence. The pianist sat motionless at the piano.Her fingers outstretched and tense ready to play.The cellist raised his right eyebrow indicating to her that she should start. She sat there and did nothing. The cellist, reflecting her silence, sat  motionless again with his arms poised as if to strike the first note.”

ROSIE “ I know the piece. He is allowing us to  experience the silence as a composer, not just a listener.The room was filled with people some of whom were drawn into the silence. It felt like a cathedral. We were held in that state of being that perfect attention creates. ”

QU “Yes. He is allowing the audience to experience the power of silence. The possession, and the action that follows from the possession of silence, and from which compositions are made and played.”

ROSIE “ What Cage did was to take that private space into a public space. What the audience then did with it was up to them.”

QU “ Yes. The silence is there for us all.It comes and goes with one's awareness. One has to listen for it. It can come spontaneously when one is alone, or holding someone one loves, or just by walking in the woods. The point is to be able to recognise it.”

ROSIE “There are times in one’s life when one's inner state matches that of the world and there appears to be no way out.There is no starting all over again with a new beginning. One just has to start where one finds oneself, within that silence, and pick up the pieces and start all over again. With art there is always an empty canvas.”​

QU “What are you working on now?

ROSIE “The sensuality of the land. The sheer eroticism of it. It is like flesh. I want to stroke it.I want to grab and mould it.”
 

Recent landscapes by Rosie     250 x 105mm

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BEING CREATIVE

12/2/2021

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by ROSIE PHIPPS

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.
Before we talk about this aspect let us first enlarge on a few of the things it is not.
  • We like to think that every child is filled with creative potential that is extinguished by parental control, so that as adults we go around feeling that there is a book inside if only we could get it out. Self expression of personal ideas and emotions do not necessarily go hand in hand with creativity, which goes beyond the personal. The test lies in how relevant it is to the collective mind.
  • The second mistake is to think that creativity is linked only to art, music and drama – this ignores the rest of creativity which manifests in business and technology. Creativity releases itself in many fields of activity. People say to me, “why do you have a marketing college when you can paint?" The answer is very simple: creating an organisation is a creative act, each relationship can also be a creative act.
  • Confusion lies also in equating creativity with production, creating objects that can be judged.Creativity is an end in itself. Just being in "it"  is enough. Rather like meditation the presence is enough, for me. With painting I get the added benefit of the image and the colours forming themselves out of the silence. I would imagine musicians experience the same process as do dancers and actors and so on.
  • Creativity needs also not be confused with the word good – all creativity is not good- one only has to think of the atom bomb. The confusion of goodness comes from thinking that everything that God creates is good – therefore if we create, then we are mimicking an act of God, therefore it must be good. Creativity can also be destructive. It can also have a dual face. With painting one needs to harness both sides, creativity and destruction.
  • Creativity must have a personal "I " that does the creating. However, the "I” has to be set aside, or at least not be in the way. At an art group we were encouraged to walk round with our pictures and say after the experience -“I did that. This is what I did.” But this owning comes after the event, part of the communication process that has nothing to do with the creativity itself. It is part of the selling process which is narrow and oppressive and focuses on the product. Creativity happens unobserved and without judgment. If creativity relied on judgment it would have to rely on the personal ego- the observer who is judging – this process would be destructive. Here the observer and the observation is one. There is unity and no duality. Duality comes after the act; it is not part of the process.The original vision is where one needs to start from.
  • Different artworks also help impregnate other works of creativity – for example I listen to music and that helps set off a hot spark, I dance – one image whether it be music, sculpture or art will set off another spark. Creativity then builds upon itself and continues to pressure one to move to the next work. ​​
Picture
Birth of the Sunchild - painted around 1976
Picture
Mother and Child Bella - painted around 1998
Picture
A Celebration of Life - painted 2020
​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.
Picture
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A conversation with Rosie Phipps

2/20/2019

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Picture
I went to see Rosie in her new studio. One she admits is really only used to do relatively clean work. Light and airy with a high roof and sliding glass doors that look straight out onto a small magical garden. At the back of her garden is a shed filled with paint and canvases, “mostly old”, she confesses, used to practice on over the 40 years she has lived in Oxford. Recently retired after creating and running Oxford Professional Education Group, an independent post graduate college. She is also a Tavistock trained organisational consultant.

As she made the coffee she said, “Every material is a medium that can be used for self expression. Including creating a business. It gives one a way of transcending the outside world. The medium, or indeed the ideas, becomes part of one in a way where one can feel love and a deep sense of relatedness to the world outside. A sense of equanimity. The paint on the paper creates what feels like a living being that takes one into a relationship with oneself. The deepest aspects of oneself. And then extends towards the outside world.”

She explained to me that the process of painting demands an emotional flexibility. The tolerance of the spoiling and imperfections of a creation for long enough so that one is able to delay destroying it in order to be able to take in a new point of view. Sometimes one can destroy what has been created, but the real purpose is not to tear it up, the real purpose is to be able to look at the imperfections for long enough so that they can be viewed in a different way. Sometimes this can take years. It is like the way one runs one's life. The liquid puddle of paint becomes an eternal presence from which new possibilities can be reached.

She said, “The canvas, is like bringing up a family , I work on it until it reaches the perfection I think is possible . And like a family it would never be abandoned, it would always be there. Something that I could never be able to walk away from.”

I looked around her studio and noticed the paintings that lined the walls. Others stacked up on the floor. “Yes, “ she admitted ,”The paintings stay on the easel until they reach in my mind, or rather create, in my mind, or heart the sort of equanimity I look for in real life." She laughed, ”A relationship that I can rely on. One I am able to retreat to when all relationships began to exhaust me. A unity. An eternal bond to the process of painting, to creation. A visual diary of my life.”

The subject turned to Rosie's choice of mediums. “I love the smell of turpentine and oil paint and the texture of gouache and watercolor. I sometimes say to myself, Why not try felt like Beuys, or straw like Anton Kiefer, or emblems of my body like hair like Barbara Kendrick, or blood ( Heman Nitsxh)."

When I asked her if she had exhibited many of her paintings, she replied to me that most of them had rarely been exhibited. “Never good enough.” She said she wanted her paintings to have “legs”, such that they would walk into another’s imagination and create an eternal presence. Perhaps even experienced by them as something that in the looking, or rather in the process of gazing would transform them as well, and reach a point when the atmosphere in the room in which the painting hung became one of contemplation.

Though Rosie said she liked her surfaces smooth, unbroken and unflawed, like skin, I noticed that some were painted on crumpled paper. She said she likes to start with disorder and chaos. But all were patterned, mostly deeply patterned. “Light creates the brush strokes and the forms, I follow those.” The broken surface of the collage did not attract her and she found them rather disturbing as she was required to bring the shattered pieces together, but she felt they always showed some area where the pieces could be pulled off. “Like some damned itch waiting to be scratched and always reminding one that the beauty that could be created could also be pulled apart. Exposing not mere skin, but the flesh behind it.” Peeled apart, what was she worried about? I understood from her that that what looked so good was merely a temporary state before decay set in. The boundary to the world was not complete and would face disintegration. A world glued together. An absurd fragmented world where the parts did not always fit. Her paintings did not remind me of this. she was concerned with wholeness and tranquility. She wondered if this was why people liked jigsaws. The disorder and then the satisfaction of seeing it all fit together. Painting had the same quality only nothing for her had to be preformed - but there again perhaps she needed a different sort of chaos and intensity to create her own finished jigsaw. A making sense of her life.

Currently Rosie is working on vases of flowers. "Like the flowers of life, growing, decaying. I feel the abundance of life. Life at 74 is full of beauty. A celebration. I have had a wonderful time living in Oxford with more flowers raining in on me every day.But they are also a reminder that the same flowers will soon decorate my grave." I asked her then about the landscapes. Small paintings in stunning white frames. “Ah, the landscapes. The pleasure of sitting in a field all day staring at the way the fields are shaped by the contours of the earth. And shaped again by the shadows of the clouds that tumble across the sky. Always changing. And always there giving one a sense of familiarity and stability. The Cotswold's. So different from where i was brought up. The wild and endless landscape of the Transvaal in South Africa. No neat fields.”

What are Rosie's next plans... “2019 Oxfordshire Artweeks. All my energy is now placed on preparing for the opening of my studio. I also belong to  LiterArties and we have exhibitions coming up over the next year, and there are the Oxford Art Society exhibitions.
​
So, I concluded, a full life and one filled with peace. 



0 Comments

BEING CREATIVE

1/2/2019

0 Comments

 

by ROSIE PHIPPS

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.
Before we talk about this aspect let us first enlarge on a few of the things it is not.
  • We like to think that every child is filled with creative potential that is extinguished by parental control, so that as adults we go around feeling that there is a book inside if only we could get it out. Self expression of personal ideas and emotions do not necessarily go hand in hand with creativity, which goes beyond the personal. The test lies in how relevant it is to the collective mind.
  • The second mistake is to think that creativity is linked only to art, music and drama – this ignores the rest of creativity which manifests in business and technology. Creativity releases itself in many fields of activity. People say to me, “why do you have a marketing college when you can paint?" The answer is very simple: creating an organisation is a creative act, each relationship can also be a creative act.
  • Confusion lies also in equating creativity with production, creating objects that can be judged.Creativity is an end in itself. Just being in "it"  is enough. Rather like meditation the presence is enough, for me. With painting I get the added benefit of the image and the colours forming themselves out of the silence. I would imagine musicians experience the same process as do dancers and actors and so on.
  • Creativity needs also not be confused with the word good – all creativity is not good- one only has to think of the atom bomb. The confusion of goodness comes from thinking that everything that God creates is good – therefore if we create, then we are mimicking an act of God, therefore it must be good. Creativity can also be destructive. It can also have a dual face. With painting one needs to harness both sides, creativity and destruction.
  • Creativity must have a personal "I " that does the creating. However, the "I” has to be set aside, or at least not be in the way. At an art group we were encouraged to walk round with our pictures and say after the experience -“I did that. This is what I did.” But this owning comes after the event, part of the communication process that has nothing to do with the creativity itself. It is part of the selling process which is narrow and oppressive and focuses on the product. Creativity happens unobserved and without judgment. If creativity relied on judgment it would have to rely on the personal ego- the observer who is judging – this process would be destructive. Here the observer and the observation is one. There is unity and no duality. Duality comes after the act; it is not part of the process.The original vision is where one needs to start from.
  • Different artworks also help impregnate other works of creativity – for example I listen to music and that helps set off a hot spark, I dance – one image whether it be music, sculpture or art will set off another spark. Creativity then builds upon itself and continues to pressure one to move to the next work. ​
Picture
Birth of the Sun Child - Painted around 1976
Picture
Mother & Child Bella - Painted around 1998
Picture
Large Bowl of Flowers - Painted 2020
​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.
Picture
Small landscape - Painted 2021
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