Even with a busy 9-5 schedule, I’ve managed to find some time to experiment. I focus on recovery and taking care of my well-being during downtime. I’ve experimented with creating new items, like transforming my paint skins into brooches, necklace pendants, and cuff links.
I’ve also been painting with alcohol inks and love the wispy ethereal abstract results I get.
I’ve started to understand the ethos of my mark-making. This allows me to start asserting the components of an artist statement for my creations. It’s all about providing an opportunity to focus on the mess.
What do you think about choosing art that portrays the reality of messy situations vs clear, crisp representations of things? It speaks to my critical realism.
I continue logging my now developed practice and process of sharpening my artistic talents. The first half of the year will see less written content from me. Instead I shall be creating more videos and providing links of what I have uploaded from my you tube channel.
I also integrate more of my insights from my executive team coaching course that I did as I found I can use my practice as an artist and maker to help senior executive teams and virtual teams become more effective. Look out for the calls for participants to the inaugural art led executive team coaching programs, that I will personally offer and deliver early to mid 2025.
So for this week, enjoy this video of me taking down my Christmas decorations from my own home office backdrop. It might perhaps be symbolic of marking the end of an era as this year I integrate more of my talents into on sophisticated offering to the world.
Subscribe and ask questions about how I integrate art and playful practices into developing leadership teams.
Visiting my local hospital I found it enjoyable to pause and explore the art.
Charring Cross Hospital uses art well. The images below are what captured my thoughts this week when I visited the hospital for a check up.
Not only was I mesmerised by the colours, the vibrancy of the paintings, I noticed how easy it was for me to feel calmed and be part of a community of gallery viewers enjoying the art at my local hospital. You saw it, it made you contemplate when when you walk through their corridors or approached the lifts.
David Wiseman’s huge artwork on the first floor of Charring Cross hospitalLovely small artworks on display at Charring Cross hospital in the main entranceThe wide array of artwork at the entrance of the hospital in Fulham
I never noticed the art before, it was a stressful moment for me but the art helped me to feel calmer. But it is a lesson to us all about the role that art could play in our own workspace.
Art is known to uplift, bring joy, elevate, bring hope or help our racing thoughts pause from its meditative transfixing properties.
So don’t forget to include art purchases if you are renovating your own home office and wanting to style your shelves.
Let me know in the comments, how many pieces of art do you have in your home office? How many on your shelves? How much art is on your wall to create an aesthetic virtual meeting backdrop?
If you want to see the art I created small enough to display on shelves, click on this link to browse the art that I sell on Etsy.
This week’s AI generated featured image gets an 8/10 it resembles the mess when you are doing product photography.
This week, I was reminded of my academic interest in the Journal of Organisational Aesthetics, which comes out of the highly lauded Tavistock to explore how human senses and artistry inform businesses and many other company practices found in charities and government.
Since I currently work at the intersection of art and organisational behaviour creation, I thought my take on organisational aesthetics might be unique and was looking forward to presenting a couple of papers to this scholarly community.
However, I later discovered that the very thing informing the presentation of my art practice is mostly from my experience in my first career, where appealing to the customer’s five senses was what we were all about in the world of the five-star spa.
I had an intense weekend. Synthesizing a range of ideas in re-doing some product photography. I had to fit in with Etsy’s new rules for sizing from listening to some of their reasserting of the preference of the algorithm for light backgrounds, in pictures. I also had to remember what my shelf styling class taught me about arranging items with natural materials. Additionally I integrated what the product photography coach said about getting good lighting with proper window positioning and using tools to get filler light to remove shadows and cast secondary light on areas of the product. Those are the three main main pieces of aesthetics advice that Etsy sellers get. It’s given as a recommendation of appealing to customers and selling more items. And the practice would appear to be in the thick of organisational aesthetics, however the scholars do say they distinctly focus on beauty for the sake of engaging the senses and not just for profit or sales.
I dug deeper into what organisational aesthetics might mean to me and the art I do and how I present it. I asked myself:
Q: What is this Aesthetic that I create and cannot avoid repeating? Where does it come from?
A: It comes from within and some of it might be the imprint of your spa and beauty years.
Hidden Letters: Purple Haze Abstract Mixed Media against lighter background.
Poured pain skin presented around a table lamp frame.
Hidden Letters Beach Blue: Abstract Mixed Media against lighter background.
Hidden Letters: Orange haze Abstract Mixed Media against lighter background.
After a few struggles and wondering why my arrangements do not look corporate in the slightest, no matter how many books and staplers I insert. I then realised my style comes from an imprint from my early career induction into the interior design and decor values of five star spas, Mayfair clinics/ treatment centres head offices and London’s West-End retail (my first proper Saturday job was Miss Selfridge in Knightsbridge).
It also dawned on me that this is a group (except the West End retail) that might welcome some help. I remember being a sole trader in my city of London treatment room, unsure how to fit out the space I was renting. However, my friend Rachel helped to wallpaper in Timinney Fowler and fit the blush-coloured carpet at the reception. I just had a flashback of getting the electrician to install a gothic lamp and fill up our IKEA cabinet; it would have been nice to have someone to discuss shelf displays that might make the products look more appealing through storytelling other than piling the boxes boxes of moisturiser and serum high.
If you are an independent trader or sole operator in the beauty and spa world and agree that product houses could help more with your displays please comment below.
If you are in any other industry and a sole operator and wondering how you learned to present your professional and personal brand and how organisational aesthetics fits with what you do, please comment below.
How did you come to know what your style or aesthic preference is? How does your organisation use organisational aesthetics not only to bring in revenue but just for the value of having something beautiful to look at?
Below is a list of the posts you might have missed from August
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