we get frustrated when we make rubbish. We might be able to intellectually understand that that might be part of the journey. This is honest, generous and humorous conversations to feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me Louise Fletcher.

And me, Alice Sheridan.

This week's topic is inspired by a conversation in a Facebook group and it's all about what do you do when you can't make art, you don't feel like making art, what do you do, do we ever experience it, what do we do? We're just going to have a general chat about this feeling of blah? That's a very cheery topic, isn't it? I've just made it sound great. We're just going to have a conversation about blah. But before we talk about blur, what have you been up to Alice?

I have been finishing edges, which I really like. I'm waiting for varnish to arrive. I had a big studio tidy up.

So the studio is kind of I don't want to take everything off the walls because I've still got to varnish them but I had a big studio clear up and do you remember that time with

cardi paper a while ago I thought I think guess what I'll do?

Get that out again. I have another play with that because I hated it so much. Here we go. Let's do it again. So I kind of thought well let's have a go with this again, knowing what I felt difficult about it last time.

So anticipating, if you like, some of the things that I've found frustrating before and accepting that they're just going to be part of it this time. Let's just play and see what happens and actually try to use those a little bit to my advantage. So the texture of the paper I've been almost kind of partially I think I

jessowed them all last time but this time I partially jessowed them so that it absorbs the following layers of paint a little bit differently and I've been thinking about using much larger areas of paint and colour and they're all just kind of at first stages but actually I really enjoyed it.

So those and then the little tiny mini ones that I work on at home they're kind of

progressing quite nicely you know when you just get to that stage where you just feel

again a little bit maybe like what we're going to talk about they're in a state of there and then all of a sudden they get to a stage where you think oh oh there's something may be happening here

so that's quite nice and looking at it from the other side of the room. The ones you can see in the

background are the ones that aren't working, but the ones that are working, they just have quite

a nice sense of light within them and what but what I notice is that with smaller works I tend to feel like I have to give them more of a hook like I have to make more of a landscape association for them to feel relevant and I think that's a really interesting thing to play with.

I'm trying to push against that a little bit, but it still keeps popping back up again.

So that's what I've been doing.

It's funny because I find in the small ones I seem to be able to be more abstract.

Right. The large ones I seem to go towards landscape.

It's funny where we get stuck.

Yeah, yeah, what about you?

Well, the beginning of the week, I've written in my notes, taxes, yay, we don't have have them done we don't have to say yay but I got my American

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