Some way back...

“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Pablo Picasso

“I was 19, I was happy, wasn’t sure where I was going. Not much has changed in 30 years.” 

Those were the first lines written on this blog, Touches of sense…

Here I am in 2022, starting a new adventure, a web site, to be entitled: 

Some way back… 

Simon.Ensor.Art

I have always known that I was an artist.

My father used to ask me to illustrate his sermons. 

My mother told the school I painted like Lowry (I didn’t).

"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."

John Steinbeck.

My art teacher was a great teacher, he would give me excellent marks and then fail to convince me to do some work. 

Others told me to concentrate on more serious subjects.

Below is a drawing I knocked off for homework when I was 16 years old. 

The art teacher’s comments have been nagging me ever since.

I am writing now as a 60 year old Anglo-French artist, driven by a single question:

“What happens when I really put my mind to developing a body of visual art?” 

Some way back…

is a means to document and share responses to that question. 

“An artist without faith is like a painter who was born blind.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

As an artist, I have been working passionately for the past 34 years as an English teacher with thousands of students, exploring the medium and discovering the desire and the means to transform it. I have spent years studying and adapting my actions to the complexity and unpredictability of human interactions and learning. Faith and hard work has enabled this artist to see further…

Art has always been a way to lose myself and to find myself elsewhere.

Along the way, 

I have developed my voice as a blogger in Touches of sense…, connected and collaborated as an educator and as an artist with kindred creative spirits from around the world and employed more or less academic genres to communicate and to publish radical educational messages. The 482 blog posts that I have written since 2010 have become progressively more and more concerned with visual art. The last one, Touches of light, preciously preserved marked some sort of epiphany.

“A page escapes to leafy paths[...]Ephemera rendered eternal.Taking a moment to contemplate. Pause, gaze, breathe in, remember. Moving, losing sight, feeling loss.”

Ever since I was born, I have been acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of life and the infinite value of artistic expression. My father’s work was rhythmed by life’s passing seasons and the rituals of baptism, marriage,and death. My mother shared her love for music, poetry, gardening and nature,and an eye for beauty to be found in driftwood, pebbles, and bric-à-brac. 

Some way back…

Is made up of moments of figurative and abstract meaning making. I find flow and express emotions by letting myself be moved by the moment, the media, making marks intentionally or serendipitously. I am drawn to gaze at distant horizons and to investigate universes glimpsed through close focus. At times, images emerge organically with no apparent source. Certain motifs are  recurrent: nature, landscape, seascapes, mountains, rocks, trees, paths…the objective is always to discover new lands to be able to perceive what lies beyond the self, the subject, the page.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Touches of sense… has been a means to map out areas I want to explore and to excavate and to study the reasons why they are important.

Each collection, each image has its back story. Some way back will build upon these foundations. 

Between 2014, and 2018 much of my artistic work was multi-media,collaborative and digital, combining poetry, spoken voice and images in assemblages. I owe much to my friends of #clmooc.

 

Since 2018, starting with “A vine branches wildly…”  I have concentrated my art practice predominantly on watercolor painting, ink, charcoal and graphite drawing. 

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know and how much you need to learn.

When I speak to those who I consider to be master artists, I am comforted when they agree with this quote of George Leonard:

“We fail to realise that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to fail, and try again. For as long as he or she lives.”

I have stayed true to my path day after day, year after year. 

To my surprise it appears that this is its latest twist. 

I am working now on some way forward.

Simon Ensor

Artist exploring the ephemeral nature of life via figuration & abstraction, flow & scribble, intention & serendipity.

P.S.

I have no idea whether this will be the last post in Touches of sense...

It has been quite a while since I felt moved to write here.

The words just wouldn't come...

Juggling.

I am up too early in the morning, juggling
in my head.

This is what researching complexity does to you  - you find yourself with two many balls spinning around in your brain.





Fuck it.

I dropped an F word.

I have diminished responsibility.

Sorry.

Some of those balls have been thrown into the air by others.

Stop it, stop it, bloody stop it.

There it is.

I dropped a B word.

It's your fault.

There are too many of them now.

All at once.

Damn.

I dropped a D word.

I keep trying, but I need to practice more to keep it up.

"Cheers."

Damn that Nietzshe.

What was it Sarah was saying the other day?

She had dream dialogues with a dead German philosopher.

Well as long as he left her to sleep and he didn't wake her up.

I am beyond dreaming.

I am regretfully awake.

At half past four in the morning.

I woke up to go and paste the juggling photo on a conference presentation.

That's what was keeping me up.

Up till midnight transcribing a conversation with a young teacher in a bar.

What was it that he said at the beginning of the dialogue?

"Cheers."

Then the conversation went on for another fifty two minutes.

"Cheers."

I have done eleven minutes of transcription.

It took me an hour.

"Cheers."

So here I am.

I have all these bloody balls in my head.

Some of them are nodes on networks - people, stories, discourses, smartphones, classrooms.

Others are spread out over time.

Others you need a zoom lens to see and study.

I have turned into some sort of biologist with a microscope.

I have turned into some sort of naturalist in a hide listening to bird song, watching a fox, watching an owl, watching a boar eating acorns, watching me, watching me.

I keep my head low, I wear camouflage for fear that I will disturb the wildlife.

Is this my bloody hide?

It will get me skinned.

Touches of sense?

Touches of madness rather.

It was Waldrop that set it off.

Well he dropped a bloody ball.

Well God...you have to blame somebody.

And muggins here picked it up.

And now it's spinning around in my head.

At dawn.

At.

At.

"The edge of chaos, the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive and alive."
Mitchell Waldrop.

That's where I find myself at four forty eight in the morning.

At the edge of chaos.

I size it up.

I keep my eye on the ball.

I am clearly alive.

This is spontaneous.

I suppose this is some sort of  adaptive action.

I am alive.

But uncomfortably awake.

But, Mitchell did say "battle zone"... 

Desperation.

November 13th 2015.

Some die.

I am missing them.

I am missing them.

I am missing my friends out there.

In no particular order.

They keep popping up in my head.

Where's that juggling gif that I made?

There it is.

I thought it would come in some day.

It's a bit rough.

It will do.

Blimey, why did I choose those pictures?

I can't remember.

I am missing my friends out there.

In no particular order.

Terry, Kevin, Sarah, Wendy, Maha, Mia, Ken, Keith, Ron, Alan....uncle Tom Cobbley et al.

I could go on.

I'll be back.

Online....Offline, I have been juggling.

Incommunicado.

Concentrating on getting those balls up.

I have been juggling.

Stop throwing me bloody balls!

I already have too many.

I know they are juggling too.

My friends...that is.

I have been juggling.

But not here.

Not visibly.

I am juggling now.

On paper.

In my head.

Silently.

I am looking forward to having more play time.

No. I am looking forward to less solitary games.

Too many balls in my head.

I have been quiet quite a while.

The conference presentation is almost ready.

I am almost ready.

Learning on the edge of chaos...

Trying to map a route with/through complexity ain't easy.

It ain't easy.

It won't go in straight lines.

There are too many curve balls to catch.

Sod it.

That's my limit.

There's those students to throw a few balls to.

They can juggle too.

For me, for them, for you.

We all drop off eventually.

I am hoping this will help me drop off.

For an hour and forty minutes.

What was it that Nietzsche was saying?

Doodling in Latin...

Any scrap of paper will do.

(The scrap on the left, on which the image of an old man is drawn, is an example.)

This class has got nothing to do with me.

I shall be elsewhere.

I escape the clutches of Latin grammar and let my mind wander.

I am the archetypal distracted student.

I am the one at the back that the teacher gives stern looks to.

All those bad school reports now make me realise that the teachers were less concerned about my learning and more concerned about my playing their game.

I just couldn't be bothered.

I watched Dave Cormier's video presenting the theme for week 1 and it left me feeling a little frustrated. I didn't like the sound of 'learning subjectives'; I mean that literally I didn't like the sonority of the word subjectives.

Apart from the obvious objective subjective (false) dichotomy there was little, I felt I could dig into, to explore.

It felt to me like I was already with a spade and wheelbarrow to unearth rhizomes and all I got was a lump of concrete just under the surface.

After an initial exploration of what other diggers had come up with, I found a few rich roots to unearth and to contemplate.

They had clearly found more inspiration.

They were not bothering so much to dig downwards into the Dave Cormier prompt, they were working laterally, letting their gaze wander more widely.

I chose three posts which marked me from the first days of rhizo15:

Firstly there was Keith Hamon's wonderful swarming post:  "Ethics in MOOCS: the Two Four Ten or so Commandments of #rhizo15"  . Each of Keith's posts are a MOOC in themselves.  I have great admiration for the sobriety, the precision, the intellectual depth of Keith's writing.

Then there was Susan Watson's "Subjective Learning Subjugated-Objectives Subversive-Subjunctives." I love how Susan uses language, how she exudes energy in her writing. I love her word play, she set me off on one of the games that I prefer.

After there was Mary Ann Reilly's beautifully written, heart-breaking piece on the death of her mother "What it was I was listening for." It made me think back on how rhizo14 had been for me in part a process of grieving.

I immediately went back and read two posts that I wrote at the beginning of that course: Suspend disbelief and Life beyond the meme. Learning is often recursive. Learning is indeed grief engraved.

I came back to Dave Cormier's 'learning subjectives' what on earth could I do with it?

Prompted by Susan Watson's word play, I decided to cut up the word 'subjective'.

How many words could I find with 'ject'?

Trajectory  - that was a good start. It connected with mapping and rhizomes. Rhizomes map laterally.

Adjective
Objective
Subjective
Reject
Deject
Abject

Hmm.  Prefixes and Suffixes I thought that could be worth exploring.

In fact what did 'ject' mean?

Latin classes were actually proving pretty useful so many years after.

I googled 'ject' - I had never done that before.

All of that thanks to Dave Cormier!

'Ject' is a 'root' word - marvellous for rhizomes!

I found a resource for English students.

There was something in the introduction which immediately struck me:

'An oddity about this ROOT is that it never stands alone, as other ROOTS do. 
Standing alone it has no meaning.'

These ROOT-WORDS are JAC, JEC & JECT meaning THROW & LIE. An oddity about this ROOT is that it never stands alone, as other ROOTS do. Standing alone, it has no meaning. It is entirely dependent on prefixes and suffixes to be meaningful. 

1. Dejected : de JECT ed (de jekt’ ed) adj. 

Low in spirits; cast down 


2. Dejection : de JECT ion (de jek’ shun) n. 

A condition of despair; depression 


3. Adjacent : ad JAC ent (ad jas’ ent) adj. 

Next to; as, the adjacent house 


4. Adject : ad JECT (a jekt’) v. 

To add to; to annex 


5. Adjective : ad JECT ive (aj’ ek tiv) n. 

Not standing alone; a word which modifies a noun 


6. Adjectival : ad JECT ival (aj ek tie’ val) adj. 

Using many adjectives; as, an adjectival style 


7. Conject : conJECT (kon jekt’) v. 

To plan; to surmise 


8. Conjecture : con JECT ure (kon jek’ chur) v. 

To form an opinion; to surmise 


9. Ejaculate : e JAC ulate (e jak’ yu late) v. 

To throw out; cry out 


10. Eject : e JECT (e jekt) v. 

To throw out; as, eject him from the hall 


So, those Latin classes were not only useful for practising my doodling, they also enabled me to recognise how words are constructed.

I take back all that I have said about Latin.

Rhizomatic learning in rhizo15 is about making connections.

Dave Cormier you are a genius.

What a wonderful week 1 video!

We are at ROOT social  animals we are JECTS.

We are thrown out and there we lie, helpless.

Little by little we try to make sense of our lot.

I think we all come to the same conclusion: Alone we are meaningless.

The morning after...

The wake-up was difficult.

After the euphoria of the nights before the drear of reality started to hit the people hard.

The party was over.

Somehow the rucksacks seemed impossible to pack. 

The combination of fatigue, hangover, and rain was a powerful depressant.

Looking around, the last remaining tents seemed to be marooned in an ocean of junk. Discernible, were discarded cans of Coke, empty water bottles, mountains of cigarette butts, the odd comatose drunk.

How could a festival of free music, free love, free speech,  free joints have been reduced to this desolation?

There are those of us who were there at the beginning and left early.

Our dreams and our illusions are kept intact. We were going to change the world. We have changed the world. We are living in our world. We are living in our world for ever.

There are those who were there and who realise that we were never really free. 

Our dreams and our illusions keep us sane. We never change the world. We have never changed the world. We are living in our world. We are living in our world for ever.

There are those were never invited.

Our dreams and illusions mean nothing to them. They know that we never change the world. We have never changed the world. We are living, we are just about living in our world. We are living in our world for ever. 

For ever is a short time.