Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Writing with pictures

In the 1970s I went travelling to the USA and ended up living in Oregon. I had gotten a job planting trees out on the steep sloping graveyards where logging had decimated majestic conifer forests and the logging companies were obliged to replant. There I met an artist and poet called Paula Treacy.  (She is now known as Simone Treacy- Croft. How she got the name Simone is another story). When we called it quits on the tree planting we moved in together into a house by the freeway in the counterculture capital of the world - Eugene, Oregon. We drank a lot of thick black coffee and spent our days documenting our lives, our hopes and dreams, our joy and pain, in artist diaries. This is when I learned to write with pictures.(Click on pics for close up).



















(c) Jan Cornall 1975

Have you ever wanted to bust free from just writing: to write in pictures or paint with words, create a narrative with photographs or filmed images? 

In March 2015 we were in Siem Reap, Cambodia for Temple Dreaming in Angkor Wat. 

It was a trip designed for creative artists of all modalities: painters, poets, photographers, filmsters, performers, writers, doodlers, journalers, et al. An invitation to journey into the heart and spirit of your creativity and explore the ancient temples of Angkor Wat and its surrounds for the purpose making a creative work — collection of poems, sketches, paintings, a creative journal, a short story, notes for a novel, exhibition of photos, short film.  

Seven days of workshops and temple excursions with a showing/presentation of your work on our final evening. A highlight was our workshop The Art of Visual Story Telling with guest tutor, illustrator/comic artist Louie Joyce. Check out  his work and vids here.

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