Improving your artistic practice

Improving your artistic practice

Yes, please feel free to twitch at the title, and the use of ‘practice’ as a noun.

I’m softening you up for a book that is worth the reading, and may help you think and imagine. I’m grateful to Tracy Calder for her article recommending it in Black and White Photography – a magazine worth seeking out and subscribing to.

One of Tracy’s suggestions (and there are 49 others in the current edition of Black and White) is to try ‘flat lay’ photography – still life images of objects laid on a flat surface. As it happens, I’ve been planning a shot like this for a couple of days.

But in passing, Tracy mentioned Philippa Stanton’s book Conscious Creativity, so I downloaded a copy. It is about creative journeys, so it’s not the book for you if you want to hone technical skills. But it’s applicable to all sorts of creativity, not just photography. Gardening, music, painting – the same ideas apply.



Like all the best books and courses, there’s work to do, and you will benefit from dedicating a small notebook or a few sheets of a writing pad to your answers. Philippa will lead you through things to make your ‘practice’ more wide-ranging, and find ways to spark new directions and ideas.

In the Critique Gallery, we (the team) often comment that it’s important to marry up creative ideas and solid technical skill. Creative ideas without craftsmanship are (at best) messy: perfect technique alone produces arid images. But the two need different sorts of effort in the development. Logic, facts, deduction and planning improve the ability to use a camera and get the result you wanted, while creativity is about freeing the imagination and changing your perception of the world around you.

Stanton suggests an approach she terms ‘lateral looking’ as an extension of Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking – so that you see what is actually in front of you, rather than what your brain tells you is there. A simple photographic example is looking at the shadows in a sunny snowscape: you ‘know’ that snow is white, and so you try to get it that way. And everything else goes wrong…

So a couple of suggestions, in Stanton fashion (exercises at the end of every chapter):

Take out a subscription to Black and White
Get Philippa Stanton’s book (very cheap on Kindle!)
But most of all, go and look at something very carefully. You may find there’s a picture to be taken…