Creativity

The Most Magical Time of the Year

Creativity Posted by Nicola Taylor / 0 comments

Almost exactly two years ago I came up with the first ideas for the body of work that became “Tales from the Moors Country.”

I was at my parents’ house over the Christmas period and everyone was out for the day. I was alone, in my pyjamas, eating chocolate for breakfast and watching Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

I had been to the local craft store a couple of days earlier and had bought some supplies for a “playbox.” Coloured cellophane, glass beads, several types of diaphanous fabrics, and I suddenly had the urge to play.

That afternoon I sat with my camera and my remote control and I took picture after picture after picture. I experimented with putting all kinds of things in front of the lens. I played with my flashgun. I wrapped myself in different pieces of fabric. I started to combine different shots in Photoshop and I started to bring in outside elements and combine those too.

And, just like that, it began. Something that seemed so pointless and meaningless shifted into the germ of the seed of something bigger. And by the springtime it was a real idea, ready to be put into action.

It occurred to me that many of the important shifts have happened at this time of the year. For me, midwinter is the time when the ideas come. It’s a time when I decide to make changes, to make shifts.

Why is this?

Because, in midwinter, after the madness and commerce of Christmas is over, there is a stillness and a peace that allows the time and space for reflection. There is nothing to be done, no where to be.

I don’t know about you, but there aren’t many other times in the year when I’d be sitting on the couch eating chocolate for breakfast and watching my favourite movies. I’d feel too guilty, too lazy. I’d have to get up and go somewhere or do something.

At Christmas, just for a few days a year, we sleep more, we sing more, we laugh more. We take a walk in the snow covered woods or on the beach.

We let go.

And when you let go, when you allow yourself to play, that’s when something magical can happen.

So my Christmas wish for you this year is that you give yourself permission to be still and see what happens. This may be the only time in the entire year when (even for just a day) you don’t have someplace to be……..That’s what makes it magic.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Joyful New Year.

The Power of a Single Moment

Creativity / Inspiration / On Being an Artist Posted by Nicola Taylor / 0 comments

“Dreaming as the Summers Die” © Nicola Taylor 2012.
Available as an open edition print in my online store

My mind experiences the world in fragments. You might call it a kind of selective memory or maybe even ADD but, when I read a story or watch a movie I can never remember the whole thing.

When I first read “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” I loved the book instantly. I gave it to anyone and everyone around me, pressing it into their hands with teary eyes and a touch of melodrama. But, in a conversation with my mother, after I had forced her to read it too, it became clear that I had completely missed many of the important plot points and some of the subtleties of the story.

However, what I remembered was this one scene and it seemed so profound that it left me breathless.

Carlo is in love with the eponymous Captain Corelli and no one knows it but us. They are Italian soldiers occupying the Greek island of Cephallonia during WW2. After the Italian Armistice they are betrayed by a German who had been their friend and the entire division is executed. Carlo throws himself in front of Corelli, sacrificing himself to save the life of his friend. Years later, as the island recovers from the ravages of war there is an earthquake and the ground splits open, exposing Carlo’s body to us for just a few minutes, reminding us of his sacrifice, then swallows him up once again. It is as if a scar on the landscape is opened up for a moment, revealing the rawness beneath, and then closes again. The moment is full of emotion and understanding of our relationship to trauma and remembrance. How it can come from nowhere, rearing up again when we think we are safe. It’s a scene that left me sobbing…..and apparently made me forget many of the details of the book. (BTW – if I’ve recounted this episode completely wrong, please don’t tell me. I love my version.)

Before I began my self portrait photography, before I was trying to tell stories with my work, I was an aspiring landscape photographer. I loved the quest to capture those beautiful moments that remind us of our connection to and place within the natural world.

When I was asked why I loved landscape photography I answered that there are times in nature when everything goes very still and time seems to move at a different pace. You can feel everything around you breathing, from the tiniest blade of grass to the gigantic ancient trees. And those moments feel like little pieces of God. When I look at great landscape photography, I feel that. I feel that communication of a kind of wonder that is almost spiritual, that can’t be communicated in words. An experience that can only be shared by provoking it in another person. That’s what I love about landscape photography and that’s what I would love to be able to do some day.

I felt this same communication of an experience that is beyond words, when I watched Terrence Malick’s beautiful film “Tree of Life.” At times in that film, I could feel the trees breathing. I could feel my connection to them and theirs to me. At the time, I was just beginning the “Tales from the Moors Country” project and I was trying to translate that communicative experience I got from landscape photography into my self portrait work. I wanted to create a love letter to the landscape of North Yorkshire, but I also wanted to create an homage to the stories of our imagination and how the landscape provokes and inspires them. And I believe these moments of grace, or magic, or whatever you want to call it, are an enormous part of what causes us to create stories, in order that we can understand our place in the world.

The big story matters. It absolutely matters. But the moment has a power that the big story lacks. Its simplicity gives it extraordinary communicative power. The moment stays with us, as the big story falls away. Moments are signposts. Whether it’s a sudden rush of clarity that changes the course of your life, or simply an experience that brings you closer to understanding another human being.

In my own humble way, I want my work to concentrate on the moments. I want to concentrate on the stories and images, the jumble, the nonsensical that is somehow oddly comprehensible. I want to provoke in you the same emotions that these stories and experiences provoke in me. I want to connect my imagination with yours and see where the collective journey takes us.

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Not all those who wander are lost

Creativity / On Being an Artist Posted by Nicola Taylor / 6 comments

I get asked all the time where my ideas come from and I always wish I had a better answer. But the truth is I often don’t really know. I don’t know why I express the things I do, in the way that I do, at least not in a conscious way. It feels like it comes from a part of me that I can’t explain in any logical or coherent way. Which is not to say that I think it’s an accident. It just means that I believe in a part of the human consciousness that doesn’t communicate with us in the ways we know and expect.

I wasn’t always an artist and I sometimes feel like this is both a blessing and a curse. There’s a lot of pressure on us as artists to have a coherent and communicable vision for our work, to have meticulously planned out and thought about every element.

Coming from a different background perhaps makes me more willing to say that I don’t plan everything in my shoots. I start with a far more loose idea about the emotion or the mood I want to create and I find my way organically by playing with different ideas and different shapes and colours. Perhaps this is why I take self portraits. I’m a patient model for myself, allowing the process to evolve naturally, as it usually does.

I wasn’t always this way. Something happened to me after I quit my office job in 2010. I had always wanted to create but had never found the time or the right medium for me. I was good in English class and I loved reading so everyone assumed that, if I was going to create, it would be as a writer. But I just never felt comfortable writing. It always felt so far removed from what I was trying to express. Just like when you have a picture in your head and when you try to draw it, it just won’t come out right. I could write reasonably well so I didn’t put it down to a lack of ability.

It was something else. It was as if what I was trying to say wasn’t verbal. It didn’t come to me in words. It came to me in image fragments, as if it were something trying to break through years of corporate life in the only way it could. These fragments were moments of a bigger story, but they were definitely visual moments. And when I was trying to express them verbally, they were getting lost in translation.

They were like dreams. Non linear. Nonsensical. Out of time. Out of context. Highly symbolic yet highly ambiguous.

I happened to come to art school to study photography at the moment in my life I was most open. I had been tightly wrapped up in a busy life for years, but I had left it all behind for a period of wandering.

I wandered to Bali, where I trained as a yoga teacher. I wandered to Thailand, where I fasted and cleansed my body of toxins. I wandered to Northern Scotland where I breathed in the crystal clean air and discovered that I could write….I just didn’t want to. And I wandered to New Hampshire, where I met my people and faced my fears of rejection at an art retreat by a lake.

On that retreat I took these pictures of myself on the dock at sunrise. These were some of my very first self portraits. Already I was using self portraits as an almost meditative exercise to open up my creativity.

Finally I wandered into art school and into the illustration section of the library. And it felt like everything in my life had happened to bring me to that moment. Of course that’s the case with every moment, but some just feel more significant than others.

Sitting looking through these visual storybooks, I wondered if I could bring the dreamlike fragments of my imagination into life in this way. I wondered if I could somehow illustrate my own internal story. A story that had been forgotten or lost.

And that’s how “Tales from the Moors Country” was born. It was born so that I could communicate what I can’t communicate in any other way. To share what I can’t share in any other way. So that I could be heard. Understood. So that, without me ever having to say “this picture is about…….” one day someone would say “Me too.” And we’d both feel better.

The Wisdom of Lady Gaga and why I’m an unpopular guest at cocktail parties

Creativity / Transformation Posted by Nicola Taylor / 2 comments

Let me tell you about a conversation I have all the time. Right now I’m a self portrait photographer taking photographs inspired by the folklore and stories of the North Yorkshire Moors. Two years ago I was a stockbroker in the City of London, stressed and very unhappy. When I have that inevitable cocktail party chat about what I do, the conversation usually goes something like this:

-What do you do?

-I’m a photographer?

-Ah, that’s cool. Have you always taken photos?

-No, not always

-But I bet you were always arty at school right?

-No. Actually I was terrible at art. I can’t draw or paint very well at all, even now.

-But you were always creative?

-Not really. I was a stockbroker for many years and I really wasn’t creative at all then.

-But when you were little, I mean really little, you probably had a great imagination, didn’t you?

-Okay, yes I did. I was always creating games and and dressing up games were my favourites.

-Ah right.

My Proudest Moment

Creativity / Photography / Transformation Posted by Nicola Taylor / 3 comments

Back in October of last year, I first heard about a competition run by Stoli Vodka to find four people to star in a short film about creativity in the UK. I was a brand new artist at the time, having just finished my course at the London College of Communication four months earlier. I had begun to sell my work to the public only two months earlier. I was terrified of winning, but I entered anyway……in the dying hours of the competition.

And because life always gives you what you need, whether you’re ready for it or not……I won! In January I was filmed by BAFTA award winning filmmaker, Martin Smith, while I shot some new images for my “Tales from the Moors Country” series. I’m absolutely thrilled with the stunning cinematography and how Martin was really able to capture the aesthetic and the mood of my images, without showing the finished work….no mean feat with someone who edits their images as much as I do.

Talent and Skill: Why Being An Artist is Like Training for a Marathon

Creativity / On Being an Artist / Photography Posted by Nicola Taylor / 8 comments

The reason why most people fail instead of succeed is because they give up what they want the most for what they want that moment. ~ Anonymous

Last year I was a full time student at the London College of Communication. It was the first time that I had ever studied Photography in any formal sense and it marked a return to education after more than ten years in the corporate world. A little less than mid way through the course I was feeling pretty frustrated with the slow pace of learning and the creative momentum with which I had entered the course was fading.

The A-Word – How mindset can stop your creativity in its tracks

Creativity Posted by Nicola Taylor / 2 comments

Two years ago I went to an art retreat in New Hampshire. I had left my job in finance six months before and I was just about to start a photography course at the London College of Communication. I had travelled in Asia on my own, trained as a yoga teacher and gone through a seven day fast that turned out to be a life changing experience. I wasn’t the same person who had walked out of the city office earlier that year.

But I was scared.

Making Space for a Full Life

Creativity / Transformation Posted by Nicola Taylor / 1 comments

Many of us think we’re not creative because we don’t create. We believe that creativity cannot be denied, cannot be suppressed. We believe that it bursts through. We believe it overcomes everything else. And if it doesn’t……it’s not there. This is one of the great myths of our time. The seed is planted by a culture in love with the overnight success stories of X-Factor winners and internet entrepreneurs. It’s then watered and fed by a system that is still trying to churn out industrial workers, in a post industrial society.

Growing Pains

Business / Creativity / On Being an Artist Posted by Nicola Taylor / 1 comments

The dream is usually the same. I’ve forgotten to do something. It’s something really important but I can’t remember what it is. I know it’s preparation but I don’t know for what. I know that someone, some time, is going to ask me a very basic question about why I do what I do and I won’t be able to answer because I haven’t done the basic preparation. And then everyone will know. I wake up, heart pounding, and I think it’s real. I pick up the notepad by my bed, determined that I will write down this thing that I must do so that this situation never happens to me. But by the time I switch on the light, the dream has melted into the ether and I write down something along the lines of “Be prepared. For everything.”

Ready for my close up

Creativity / Photography Posted by Nicola Taylor / 0 comments

So I’ve been teasing you with talk of some “Extremely Exciting News” for close to a week now and today (finally) I can share it with all of you.

Creativity

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