prompt

Promise becomes reality: flowers unfurl

This is a time-lapse film of flowers opening: many of them are lilies or orchids, so the colours and patterns and shapes are stunning.

video by David de los Santos Gil

 

For variation, mute the music they are presented with, and try varieties of music in your audio library.  How does it feel with ballet music?  What is the effect when it’s jazz?  Or world music? or rap?  or spoken poetry?

Creative Takeaway

Write/paint/draw/bake/dance – whatever your chosen medium – something which expresses unfurling, movement, growing, developing, opening out….. using this video for reference points and ideas, jumping off places.

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Creative prompt: music to image

Here is some lyrics-free music by Songs of Water to imagine to, to use as a creative springboard.

You can listen to the instrumental music alone – or watch the video with its performance and glimpses of back projected images, for further prompts.

Poetry of Resilience – Irina Ratushinskaya

Poetry can inspire by acknowledging a person, telling their story, celebrating their life’s witness.  I just came across a poem by Luci Shaw, which tells us another poet/person’s story, their persistence through harsh circumstances.  Encouraging.  Luci’s poem begins with her introduction to Irina, in italics.

Irina Ratushinskaya
—Russian poet and physicist who was sentenced
to seven years in a Soviet labor camp for writing about
freedom and God. We met at a conference in Oxford
and gave a joint poetry reading.

In the gulag, denied paper, she wrote her
words on soap, then rinsed them off into the icy air
like breathing hope into the world. The words
she held safe in the wide freedom of her memory.
They were words of faith and love and outrage.
They were like her children, held in her mind’s
embrace for all those years until she could
speak them aloud and own them without fear,
un-silenced and un-cowed.

I have her little gold pill box, a love gift, still
holding in its minor space a breath of her courage.

Luci Shaw

Irina Ratushinskaya

Irina Ratushinkaya‘s account of her gulag imprisonment and how she and the other women survived, supporting one another, is published in her book: “Grey is the Colour of Hope” (resissued Hodder and Stoughton, 2016, Sceptre imprint.  ISBN: 9781473637214 available as paperback and e-book/Kindle)

Part of Irina’s poetry, in the poem “I will live and survive” is quoted in the Guardian’s fascinating obituary:

And I will tell of the first beauty
I saw in captivity.

A frost-covered window! No spy-holes, nor walls,
Nor cell-bars, nor the long endured pain –
Only a blue radiance on a tiny pane of glass,
A cast pattern – none more beautiful could be dreamt!
The more clearly you looked the more powerfully blossomed
Those brigand forests, campfires and birds!
And how many times there was bitter cold weather
And how many windows sparkled after that one –
But never was it repeated
That upheaval of rainbow ice!

If you’d like to read more of her poetry, its books are titled:

  • “No, I’m not afraid”
  • “Beyond the Limit”
  • “Pencil Letter”
  • “Dance with a shadow”
Bookjacket "In the Beginning"

early formative memoir: Irina Ratushinskaya

She has written the memoir of her earlier years as: “In the beginning: The formative years of a dissident poet”.

Her novels are “Fictions and Lies” and “The Odessans”

Creative Takeaway

Do you know someone who you deeply admire for their persistence through life, despite great difficulties?  Perhaps they could be a theme to inspire your song/poetry/visual art/dance/craft.  You may find this an encouraging exercise, which strengthens your own resilience in life.

Antsy – eh?

If you are following the daily creative prompts by Sketchbook Skool (put on the top of my blog page), read today’s, “Antsy” and began to fret, wondering what it was – if you felt very nervous, worried or unpleasantly excited by not knowing its meaning – well, that IS the definition of antsy.  It’s a North American word, so not all our readers will be familiar with it.

As well as that meaning, Cambridge Dictionary offers the following synonyms – words or phrases meaning roughly the same.  So similar in fact that you could swop one for the original word in a sentence and it would make sense.

Screen shot 2017-10-04 at 11.25.52

from Cambridge Dictionary online

 

Response to “Workout” prompt

Here is my doodle animation inspired by the word “Workout.”  Don’t blink or you’ll miss it; don’t turn up the sound, it’s silent. It’s very brief and simply made on mobile phone.

It seems to be that I’m getting slower and slower to respond to the prompts.  I wonder how you are getting on with them, if they are interesting or genuinely make you want to create.

Response to Creative Prompt: Dark

Responding to today’s creative prompt: dark.  A homemade video in response to an everyday activity and the electrifying experience of reading W H Auden’s “Refugee Blues” poem and finding it shockingly up-to-date 70 years later.

I’m kindof cheating here as I didn’t make it fresh today, it is one I made earlier.  But I’ve got a virus today (sound of violin playing).  If I had a dog it would’ve eaten my homework.

A much better reading and visuals of W H Auden’s work was recently featured on the BBC – they put his words to modern news footage.  (I made my vid first, I wasn’t copying).