This recently published webpage: Greece and painting and me reminded me of how much I love Greece. It is a while since I was there - the pandemic happened with all the life-upturning it set in process. And then airlines in a mess, and global warming, made me think twice about extra travel beyond the beloved granddaughters in New Zealand. I can tell by the way I’m bingeing on The Durrells in order to catch a glimpse of Corfu that it may be time to return. These paintings made a few years back in the Mani and now hanging in my hall are shouting more loudly each time I pass… The Moon and Scarlet ..read more

In The Second Sex, Chapter 14 The Independent Woman, Simone de Beauvoir offers a devastating critique of the problems facing women who want to be artists and writers. Much has changed since she wrote it in 1949, but also much has stayed horribly familiar. In earlier posts, I’ve shared how I’ve worked with her words since first encountering them, constructing ‘turnings’ from her original. These turnings are not statements of ‘how it is’ but rather motivations/values/desires. In this summary, I group my turnings under four themes. Her critique turns into something like a personal manifesto and/o ..read more

In my previous post on The Second Sex and what it has to say about women’s creative work, I showed the technique of OWN ~ TURN ~ OWN. In this post I share the quotes and ‘turnings’ that I extracted from Chapter 14 The Independent Woman. They are offered for anyone who wants to do their own work on this insightful and challenging text; to take or to leave, to contemplate and maybe dismiss. Even perhaps to serve as fuel for your practice. Not for the faint-hearted! Example: “Throwing oneself boldly towards goals risks setbacks: but one also attains unexpected results; prudence necessarily leads ..read more

“...she will go beyond the given in the way she expresses it, she will really be an artist, a creator who gives meaning to her life by lending meaning to the world. ” — The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir House by the sea, acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron For years, I engaged in rational, analytic study of metaphor and empathy in dialogue. Despite my best academic intentions, the imagination resisted being quietened.  In the middle of life, after cataract surgery, I plunged into painting. Years of painting that required an intensive search for my lost intuition via personal development cour ..read more

Be strong, acrylic monoprint on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2023 When I read The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir seemed to unroll my life experience like a map of the world, pointing out continents and oceans, showing how routes across this world of my life were somehow predictable. She showed me centuries of history and myth that made this inevitable. She gave me words to describe my experience, and a new way to own my experience. The little pink book is a thin slice of The Second Sex, containing the Introduction, Chapter 14 The Independent Woman, and the Conclusion. Over several years now, it has ..read more

I’m finding this interview in the artist’s studio inspiring in several ways. I love their description of what is on the wall and why. “One wall of Bastos’ studio is lined with a huge piece of mass-produced wallpaper, featuring large-scale roses in an almost dreamy but restrained colour palette of soft pinks and greys, and overlaid with a smaller painting that pops with lurid green and blue scrawl. This is the process wall, where works are made and composited and amalgamated. It’s the wall of experimentation, Bastos tells us. The wall opposite is the space for pseudo-finished work, where many ..read more

Today I wanted to revive this post from nine years ago, and to remember Jo, who offered me these words in the first place. Baltic landscape, acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron Abstract painter Willem de Kooning, talking about his practice: Each new glimpse is determined by many, Many glimpses before. It's this glimpse which inspires you -- like an occurrence. And I notice those are always my moment of having an idea That maybe I could start a painting. .... Y'know the real world, this so-called the real world, Is just something you put up with, like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a ..read more

Canal walk, acrylic and acrylic marker on canvas board, 25 x 30cm “In what ways do we belong to the world?”  This question lies at the core of the work of John Berger, according to Nikos Papastergiadis in an essay Forest (A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in celebration of John Berger, 2023, p.83.) Such a profound question ~ It’s a question that helps me think about my painting in general – how I want to share something of my experience in the world as an older woman – and about how I can develop it through the particular and specific. Currently I’m working on a series of abstract paintings ..read more

The work of self-knowledge and understanding is never done. It guides and informs everything. This quote, from an academic paper on self, identity and the danger of narrative*, spoke to me - and with a recent painting that is called Interference, (acrylic on raw canvas, 60 x 80cm). Other sources of insight currently include: *Camila Orca, K., (2018) Opaque Selves: A Ricœurian Response to Galen Strawson’s Anti- Narrative Arguments, Études Ricœuriennes / Ricœur Studies, Vol 9, No 1 (2018,) pp. 70-89 . DOI 10.5195/errs.2018.387 ..read more