How To Chill Out: 10 Tips From A Wise Polar Bear

Here is a mysterious and cool (no pun intended) polar bear to tell you some important and useful ways that you can chill out. He is qualified in instructing you on this subject because he has a diploma in chilling and likes to take long walks inside the freezer. Please listen to his wisdom.

1. Imagine you are a tiny particle of dust floating through a sunbeam. Nothing matters except the light dancing around you and the gentle, gentle drifting.
2. Eat ice cream until you are ice cream.
3. Give every last one of your possessions to a small child so that the small child can set up a profitable business venture selling crumpled print-outs of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and packets of Lemsip (I'm implying that is all you own).
4. Write a letter to your leg asking for advice. Legs are very knowledgeable and experienced.
5. Call Richard Branson and ask if he wants to eat your homemade spaghetti and have a chat about the football (just pretend you know what football is for this scenario and Richard Branson will never know you are a lying fool who literally does not even know what a foot or a ball is). He will probably come over because he loves attention and spaghetti (me and Richard Branson have that in common) and then you will be very chilled out from the friendship time with spaghetti.
6. Drink a cocktail, stroke a cat. Don't drink a cat and stroke a cocktail.
7. Realise that nothing you do ultimately matters so it's okay to concentrate on your art career by drawing seven thousand pictures of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson befriending a tiny caterpillar.
8. No.
9. Drink some water very slowly and consider it your constant mission in life to ingest tiny amounts of water all the time. If you can make this your life's focus then you will be absolutely fine. Also, not many people know that this is actually how you learn things, because water is filled with facts.
10. Print out your favourite pictures of baby animals and tape them to your eyeballs. Keep them there for the rest of your life. You will be the most chilled out person who exists. Until you walk into a lamppost.

Yellow, Orange, Red

I did some very lazy painting because I didn't want to consider my lines, I just wanted to put them somewhere faster than I could think. It's nice to let your brain do things without bothering to have conscious thoughts about those things. It's nice to think in the purest, quickest brain thoughts instead of thoughts translated into words.

Red feels like a colour that knows where it's going and what it's doing. I think red is pretty sure of itself and has had a glass of wine. I like it. I'm not really sure why I'm personifying it, but hey, I guess it's pretty fun to give colours personalities.

I made these paintings and I thought "oh, these paintings are so awful and messy" but now I've changed my mind because they've given me a certain feeling that I am enjoying. A reminder once again of the joyful carelessness of making kinda cutely rubbish-y paintings. I love being a little bit rubbish. I excel in it. Let's all be a bit rubbish together (in a happy way).

How To Relax (How To Be Okay)

• Lie down and close your eyes.
• Look at soothing dog pictures.
• Drink something warm.
• Stare at a candle.
• Let yourself feel your feelings.
• Hold a fuzzy toy, pillow, or piece of clothing. Concentrate on how it feels to touch.
• Focus on the present. The past is irrelevant because you can't change it, and the future is irrelevant because you're not there yet.
• Go for a walk and feel the air move around you.
• Remember that you are not the same version of you that existed in every previous moment. You are a composite and a new, different you.
• Remember that all the things that make you feel awed exist. Sunsets and Scandinavian pottery and Space Raiders.
• Imagine yourself as a body of water or a beam of light.
• Gather a smell you're really fond of if you can (I like lavender or cinnamon).
• Scribble or doodle something. It gives your hands a mindless thing to do, which can be calming.
• Listen to rain or fireplace or thunderstorm sounds.
• Build a blanket fort.
• Take a bath or shower just for the sake of it. Let the water warm you. You can use nice smelling things or candles.
• Tidy or clean something.
• Feed yourself, clean yourself, and generally look after yourself. Make yourself do it.
• Write a journal entry. Get all your feelings out. Don't hesitate or think about what you're writing, just write.

'Selfie'

I was thinking about the idea of the selfie and its cultural position and I thought about how much I love seeing other people's self-portraits, which immediately made me want to take some photos of myself too. In the yellow glow-light of the evening. In my pyjamas. My most accurate state, really. Blessed be thy camera.

I do find this kind of self documentation really interesting and I love those little personal snippets of people's lives to be found online (after all, that's what many of us are doing here with our hideously self-indulgent blogs *audible wink*) and I love to capture and explore myself and my existence and my surroundings through considering myself and all aspects of ME. I remember art tutors telling me that my work was too insular or personal or whatever and I thought: "But............ my things................ that I make..... are about................... me? That's......................... completely understandable and fine? What's wrong with self-focus in my own life which fundamentally centres around me?" To me that insularity was paramount. That was my central thing. The core of everything.

I feel like the more I happily explore and celebrate my own existence and being and person, the more I also do the same thing with other people, and the better a person I become! Knowing and enjoying myself only strengthens my ability to know and love other people, I think. Me directing myself into my creative process and thought which may seem 'insular' has really only served to open me up and allow me to build upon myself again and again and again through a process of observation and celebration and creation which, for me, rests on images that contain myself either indirectly through text and ideas and my own voice, or directly by representations of myself like drawings or, yes, selfies. Or self-portraits, if you want to use a less loaded term.

Water Damage & Memories

I was looking through some photos and I decided I wanted to print some new ones out and mess with the print-outs, so I gathered the selection of photos in this post, printed them out, and sprinkled some water on them when they were still fresh from the printer.

I like to occasionally have physical photos as precious mementos, but at the same time I like them to be completely unprecious inkjet print-outs. Y'know, so they feel special to have, but at the same time I can handle them completely carelessly and rough them up and know it doesn't matter because I can always print new ones.

I mean, there has always been something special and nice about having physical photos, but I feel like that's enhanced with a papery feel or a crumpled texture. It adds some kind of extra tangibility which I like. It feels somehow closer or more real, like I am holding the memory in my hands more clearly.

There's something about the degradation of these photos, too. The weakening of the paper, or the bleeding of the colour. Instead of taking something away, it feels like it's adding something new. Somehow building on the picture and the memory with a new dimension.

It's a strange conviction, but I feel it. It's a thing. It reminds me of the way we would build upon art pieces in my A Level art class by making a bunch of photocopies of things and working on top of them to make new things. Memories are pretty weird. By their nature they're simply old things you're making new for a moment by reminding yourself of them and thinking about them. I'm gonna stop myself before I go on a tangent about how cool and weird the brain is, but shout out to memories and stuff - you're very interesting.

Journal: Mountains & Legs

Here are some peaceful scenes from my journal. I am getting more and more into mountains as a visual theme. They're so large and solemn and reliable. It's also nice to let loose and use some of my thickest felt tips. They feel pretty suitable for drawing mountains. Good old mountains.

I'm also really enjoying drawing dense collections of stuff. They're like inventory arrangements. Inventory: mini mountain, fried egg, lollipop, baby. Sounds about right. I always have that stuff in my inventory.

Stemming from the collection/inventory style drawings, I've been doodling some lone limbs too. Got some very satisfying rounded off arms and legs. I always owe more practice time to drawing legs. They are one of my favourite body parts of all time and I rarely devote time to them. I'm an awful leg-neglecter. Sorry, legs.

Long Hair Dreams

Hello. I am a face, and a head, and an increasing amount of hair. My hair always enjoys thwarting me. It likes to flop about and obscure my vision. It likes to get into my food as I am eating it. It likes to hang around on the floor and form gangs that hide around me room and terrorise me. Basically, my hair is pretty rude. It's probably because I brush it. No-one could be expected to endure that.

I like it enough to daydream about having 6ft hair though, so it must be doing something to make all that rudeness lovable. I'm not sure why that's a thing I'd vaguely like to happen. Maybe I spent too much time reading fairy tales. Maybe it's just a fascination with the processes and limits and extremes of the body. Maybe it's because it's the natural opposite of shaving my head, and I've already done that one.

I think that's fundamentally it. It's an exploration. Some people climb mountains or sail around the world, exploring the boundaries of our planet. Others explore the boundaries of their own bodies. Their own little planets. I'd like to be one of them, somewhere in my dreams.