What we do envisage is creating a temporary place for creativity from recycled pieces of furniture and bits and bobs.   Do you have anything that you would like to put into the Tea + Art medley?  You can either give it to us in advance, or come along on the day and find a resting spot for your favourite daggy cushion, crocheted curtain or 1970′s tea pot.

If you’re travelling light, we’d love you to pop by and just have a play with what you find lying around.  Tie some string into a human-sized spiderweb or turn Dominoes into The Leaning Tower of of Pisa.

Click here for your very official Facebook invitation to Tea + Art. (If you are not a Facebook afficionado and you would like your own non-Facebook very official invitation, please email the Sparkles Executive at rachaelclairewest@gmail.com.)

We’re really excited to have a Tea + Art space at the Northbridge fashion and design festival, Outskirts, on Sunday September 25 from 10am – 4pm.  (Event invitation for your Facebook diary here.)

In the spirit of transforming cityscapes from high street shopping malls to creative, generative spaces, Tea + Art will arrive at Outskirts armed with tea cups, art supplies and a random collection of recycled materials.

Help us set up the space – with what we have, or bring something with you to contribute. We’ll even sell you the tea cups and pencils if you become very attached.

Our goal: to see what can happen.

PS If you’d like to know more or get involved, we’d love to hear from you.   Email, comment, or visit the Facebook page.  

Looking forward to drinking tea with you.

Ms West, Sparkles Director & Ms Wilkins, Fairydust Executive

(Technologically advanced and completely “Like”able via our Facebook page)

If you too learnt piano the classical way you will have spent hours learning scales and mastering arpeggios. By the time your Grade 3 exam came around you were bored silly with the piece yet, at age eight, there was nothing to stop nerves stepping in and moving some notes around.

My student is not eight. He is 25 and has a book to help him learn the keyboard. This book begins with simple, three-note pieces and explains the difference between a crotchet and a quaver. It works its way up to two-handed minuets with phrases and moments of piano followed by mf and ff.

After three weeks (without me as his wise piano master) ‘my’ student can already play songs with ten notes – one note for each finger on each hand. This week the book will probably give him compositions that cover a whole octave. What use am I as a teacher when there is a book that can show him all that?

I began by suggesting that he experiment with touch. “Lighter on the keys to start then push down on them. As if there were a little man under the keys, teasing you by pushing up against them from below.”

“Notice the phrasing – lift your fingers away so briefly it’s almost imperceptible.”

Then I taught him scales. C major.

I taught scales because that was how I had learnt to play piano but I was doubting their value now.  “Why would you learn scales?” I asked myself. When you start your art at the age of a big person and could be playing Queen and Dylan within two months, why waste time with Solfeggio and musical theory?

The answers were deep in the back of my brain, not yet expressed in words.  “Can you hear that the tone of C major is similar to that of D major and E major? And that C major has a completely different effect on how you feel than, say, C minor?”

With scales I learn to move my fingers, to experiment with rhythm and to practise the quality of my playing without having to read difficult notes and position my hands across five-note chords. My ear can differentiate between semi-tones. I can tell you which movements will be my downfall, where I will slip and miss a beat, even if it’s so subtle you almost won’t hear it.

It’s tempting to think that the difference between someone who has created a work of art – whether that be a book or a painting – is simply that one person sat down to write a book and the other did not.  That the person who made it rich on the stock market happened upon it by chance or that the famous inventor had his one idea when he was in the shower.

When we finally come to try it for ourselves we suddenly realise the work ahead. It becomes blatantly clear where we are willing to put our energy.  In Freeplay, jazz musician and writer, Stephen Nachmanovitch says, “The most frustrating, agonising part of creative work…is our encounter with the gap between what we feel and what we can express.”

“Technique”, he says, “Can bridge this gap”.  And I think it is in the places that you are willing to bridge that gap through repetition, understanding and patience that you will know your passion.

Perhaps your craft is to explore every nuance of the touch of a paintbrush, or understand what makes a cell alive.  Perhaps you care about the words you choose to tell someone how you feel, the way you apply your make-up, or the energy you bring to swing yourself up on to a trapeze.  Whichever you choose, it is in the subtleties that lead to deeper understanding that you will find your way.

So as I embrace my role as free-piano teacher (or Chief Subtleties Advisor) I also find the possibility in myself to play my scales and arpeggios as if they are a work of art in themselves.

Closing with a little piece of advice from Freeplay, as a reminder that repetition and theory needn’t take the soul away from your art: “If you find the practice boring, don’t run away from it, but don’t tolerate it either.  Transform it into something that suits you.”

Dear Ms West (or may I call you Rachael?)

Eternally yours,
The Universe.  (You may call me Frank if you wish.)

And so The Universe (aka Frank) sent me a black wrap dress at a swishing event in London. I’ve been very impressed with Frank’s ability to grant wishes with an exception level of accuracy.  After circus school (that one wasn’t a wish, it was just Frank having a laugh) I said I wanted do find a way to study the correlation between movement, thought and self-awareness. This week I signed up to a diplome at The University of Lille that lets me do just that.

Anything you’d like to ask Frank for today?

Speaking of which, I’m finally off to The Netherlands.  I hear the men are tall and enlightened, and they ride bicycles. Hell, let’s throw in biceps and abs of steel as well!

Happy dreaming.

It feels so UNORIGINAL to say that this writing thing is a nightmare but that I can’t not do it.   I’m alternating between pulling my hair out and shrieking at my computer, with occasional bursts of gold inspiration that are nearly as painful as the moments of block because – well, I don’t know why, they just seem to hurt somewhere in the depths of my chest.

Luckily I am alone in a house in the middle of a town that has been left almost bare as the residents return to their city homes at the end of summer.

Starting was easy.  In August I was allowed to be creative and random and drink lots of tea, indulging in the romanticism of writing in rural France.  ’I'm following my heart’, I said. ‘The inspiration will come when it comes.  It is sunny and it is France and I am prepared to wait for the muses to speak.’

Now September nears its end, bringing with it cooler weather and the urge to actually finish something – perhaps the reptilian brain is kicking in, warning me not to be unemployed and hungry during winter!  Reviewing drafts is a contradiction between the blissful fastidious satisfaction of finding just the right words in just the right way and a groundhog day of seeing your own words over and over and over again.

I’ll let you know when I’m done!

That’s all there is too it, really.

You’re awesome, you’re lovely, you’re grand

You make a difference

You moved them

You sang.

They want you, they love you, adore you

Just because you’re you.

They said a bit of inner turmoil was acceptable/to be expected/bordering on normal:

I think it’s more of a big exciting messy squiggle (which will magically become bigger if you click on it):