Maija Liepins, artist
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An arrangement of sticks and twigs

All Creative Process Creativity In Motion Elemental Insight News Poetry #TheArtistsToolbox The Dream Forest

28/3/2020 0 Comments

Maija Liepins' Starflowers at Sandham, Berkshire

Sandham Memorial Chapel
Burghclere
'Saturated Space', 11-29 March 2020
a CAS group exhibition

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For Maija, granddaughter of Latvian refugees, the starflower is a variation of the latvian Auseklis an eight pointed star. When spiritual meaning of symbolic language is obscured by war-torn passages of time there comes a call to put the pieces back together using air, fire, earth, water.
A stream from my notebook:
“I am a river of life
A liquid courage
Daring to pour myself
Into this life, to see you
Sparking, blooming,
Blazing alight and
Yet so quickly burnt out
So easily exhausted of my vigour
.
I am the limitless stream
Of living breath
Of waking dream
Of creative mattering
Actively becoming in you
.
History’s fields of planted
Ghosts, a testament
To endings
Bookends on a chapter of
Why?
Why rush so valiantly
To crush the flower
?
The sacred found in the every day:
It lives in you
Protect your creations
And honour the flower
Blooming in your soul.
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9/7/2019 0 Comments

Creative Photoshop; Drawing with Digital Collage

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'Miss Petals' Dreamscape Impressions 2019
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​"My eyes adjust to the light surrounding me, everything is ethereal, clear yellow-gold. It feels like there are spikes of tall grasses made of yellow sunlight, or grasses bathed in golden light. Off to my left there is an opaque black darkness providing a high contrast and sense of a hillside. The petaled water creature, with a rainbow of pink and greens on its petals swims beside me through the golden grasses, swimming through the air like it’s water."
I scanned my hand-drawn sketch (left) into my computer yesterday and spent the afternoon creating collages, using layered duplicates and coloured screens. In this post I'll explain my use of 'creative photoshop' but first, here's a bit of background on where the image comes from:

from my dream journal:

One seed sprouts and blooms, becomes a petaled-creature like a mermaid made of flowers.  She swims out into the void, her petals rippling like seaweed.
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This image, was created by layering two copies of the image over top of one another and applying an 'Exclusion' filter to one. This ensured that both were visible, and the overlapped areas became a reverse image (whites became black, blacks became white).

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6/7/2019 0 Comments

Meditations on theWatery Sun-lit Deep

It was a hot summer evening and as I walked underneath the trees, the hot bright sunlight was low in the sky.

In sun-lit patches the light picked out leaves and plants for my attention - back-lighting them beautifully. Most notable was the sun-shot spiderweb encasing these dried flower heads. Multiple photographs and a film were taken.

Looking at the image (pictured) I was startled by the depth, and sense of movement, like looking through water.

Observations:
​

I've been attuning to the watery lately.
A 'mermaid' made of petals
was seen in my minds eye
swimming through the air above tall sun-lit grasses.

​(See pictured drawing below).
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Delicate flotsum
caught spectacularly in the river of life.
Sun warms the water layering it with
eddies of warmth sliding sensually over the slow deep chill of darker waters.
Light strung out, sweeping sideways across my vision, plant-stuff floating,
memories woken, silver spiders weaving elemental surprises: streak like acrobats on fine strong wires:
Thread that binds and thread that holds 
their visual prayer. 
A dream like whisp, a
floating pause, holding me still in this:
a sun-jewelled affair.
I was wearing orange that day (a colour associated with the sacral chakra, element: water) and as per my usual method, I created an improvised film to layer against my observation of the web. Resultant film stills (one below) were posted on Instagram.
View this post on Instagram

Miss #petals in motion #dreamscapes

A post shared by Maija Liepins (@maijaliepins) on Jul 1, 2019 at 6:46am PDT

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17/6/2019 0 Comments

'Psyche', A Soulful Reacquaintance with Creative Spirit

I almost called my artists book 'Psyche' and the excerpt below (from the introduction of 'Paper-clips with Raven') shows why.
​
​In Greek mythology Psyche is the goddess of Soul. She is the personification of souls ‘breath’. ​​I used to call my poetry ‘Soul Poems’, for in the writing I bypass my conscious thinking-mind entirely and draw from a deeper place, giving voice to hidden things.
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Puddle Portal (2019) Maija Liepins photography
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'Inner Child' 2016, Digital Collage, Maija Liepins
​​In the Norse tradition, Odin’s Ravens are called Huginn and Muninn which represent his intellectual/spiritual capabilities journeying outward (from his physical form) in the form of fittingly intelligent and curious birds.*

It is only in recent times that western science has begun to recognise the entangled inter-connection of mind, body and spirit. Our mechanical or biomedical model of the body is informed by anatomical research back when grave-robbers furnished the medical establishment with bodies to study. 

The treatment of the mind as separate and unto itself is echoed in the way psychology has been treated as a study ‘of the mind’ rather than the whole person. So for me, psyche still has connotations of ‘the mind’ and that is what is examined in this anthology. As a teen many of my poems expressed a desire for inner peace which I now equate with self-acceptance... (continue reading)

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31/5/2019 0 Comments

How to generate ideas in practice: what I learned from Making Art My Everyday

I wanted to write a little bit about how I generate work and ideas. It begins with an exploratory phase of unfettered play with no outcome in mind. The possibilities are endless, so I have discovered the value of committing to a practice. The practice is defined by a set of rules or conditions:
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'Drawing With Trees' Day 1, Walk 1, 2018

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16/5/2019 1 Comment

Sensitivity (a poem) with white summer rain

Like white summer rain
Curling up inside a swirling curve pink shell 

Smudge that expression off your face
Relax into the morning dew freshness of a dark and gaze-less space.

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    All Creative Process Creativity In Motion Elemental Insight News Poetry #TheArtistsToolbox The Dream Forest

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    Maija Liepins is an artist who has been writing stream-of-consciousness poetry since she was fifteen. She practices what Jung calls 'active imagination' which is similar, but with dreams instead of words. Improvisation has  led her to add sound and embodied movement to the mix. ​

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Photo used under Creative Commons from mikecogh