About the Author

Hi I’m Helen Bushell  an artist, gardener and recycler who believes that the world is an abundant place…as long as you like second hand.  I create mosaics from old dishes and ornaments and love teaching mosaics and the fun of recycling to many students over the years.  I garden haphazardly with my partner Bill, a fellow artist in our home studio and garden in Victoria, BC.

Along with our son Eric, we create original cast stone sculptures. All three of us indulge ourselves in pursuing themes that we love, when creating.  Eric, who has a love for old architectural details creates odd and verdant sculptures of entities with leaves or horns that harken back to old gargoyles and grotesques.  I am a lover of anything floral and create sculptures that try to capture the essence of beauty in the garden.  Bill has interests that range from the art deco period to a sculpture that reflects the ocean that we reside next to.  Serendipity is our motto.

Serendipity

The gift of being able to make delightful discoveries by pure accident. Coined by Horace Walpole after the “Three Princes of Serendip”

As the official blogger for Summer House Studio blog,  I’d like to tell you a bit more about how this blog will evolve, I hope.  When I decided to start a blog I began to wonder just what I wanted to write about.  There were so many things!

As anyone who has started a blog knows, first you spend a lot of time researching blogging and looking at a lot of blogs, lurking apparently is the name for it. One bit of advice I heard or read was that a blog should be about one thing, have a focus, in a word, a theme.

This got me thinking.  I had all these areas that I wanted to blog about, like creativity,

• nurturing creativity in everyone,
• things that I teach my mosaic students about being creative,
• creating art for the garden in our cast stone sculpture,
• creating art for the garden from found objects,
• creating mosaics from old dishes, ornaments and other found objects,
• the idea of recycling and
• not getting too caught up in the consumer society,
• the process of getting ideas for art,
• keeping your creative flow when you are not in the mood or things in your life are not quite perfect (who hasn’t had that happen?),
• gardening in general,
• trying new things in the garden, the trials and tribulations of it.

…well the list goes on and on and on.

What could be my theme?  How could I cover all the things I wanted to do?  When I attended the Alberta College of Art, I can remember being told in a pretty stern way by one of my instructors that I really must settle on one thing, not be gadding about trying everything and spreading myself too thin.  I was taken aback.  It made me question myself.

After a lot of soul searching I came to the conclusion that he was asking me to do something that was impossible, for me anyway.  I couldn’t do what he asked and still be myself. My attitude has always been that life is just too short. I need to cram as much into it as possible.  So I couldn’t just paint in one style.  I couldn’t just stick to one subject and get good at that.  I couldn’t even just stick to painting!  I got involved  with paper making, sculpture and writing and more.  I even got involved in the politics of the art college and became the student member of the Board of Governors. And that was just Art College!

Which brings me back to this blog.  What will be the theme, the locus, the unique perspective, the niche, the thread that will tie this blog together?  Because, after all of this ramble and thought, I’ve decided to ignore, just as I did in Art College,  the advice of the expert and NOT concentrate on one  thing.

But there is a theme.

The theme is the life and thoughts of an artist who likes to teach creativity, likes to create, likes to be as green as she can (ok I’m definitely not perfect in that regard) in the setting of a small garden and studio, working with a fellow artist and husband of 40 years and a pretty talented son (Ok I’m his mom after all, I get to brag).  And I’ll also throw in some of the thoughts and ideas I’ve stumbled across in all my reading and pass that on.  I fervently believe that what goes around, comes around.  And I want to send out a lot of generous vibes about living an artistic and creative life in a world that is really is  abundant, even if the news is only broadcasting recession.

So I hope you will enjoy these entries as they occur and you will let me hear from you and your thoughts.