Exploration of the Creative Process ~. Part I by Amelia Ah You

During the months of the lockdown in 2020, much of my time was spent online, mostly searching for events in social media for entertainment and enrichment. One of my favorite past time was to seek out works of contemporary artists and to learn about their creative processes. 

Here are 3 artists that stand out amongst the many: Matthew Wong, Julie Mehertu and Soumya Netrabile.

‘The night the stars and the sea were one’ by Amelia Ah You     2022

Their approach and style of expression of each are very different as you will find from the next 3 posts on the Exploration of the Creative Process. This post is of my own, not so much a discussion of my process but how a piece of writing inspired this image.

‘The night the stars and the sea were one’ by Amelia Ah You 2022

Inspiration for my work often come with making a mark, either a hard medium like pencil or charcoal, or a fluid medium like paint or ink. Sometimes I am moved by a daily encounter or distant memories. Often, I am prompted by a sentence or paragraph from a book, a poem or an article I am reading.

This quiet little piece comes after reading this excerpt from ‘Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine’ by Alan Lightman

“… It was a moonless night, and quiet. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars… I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity… I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time—extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die—seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.”

Hope you find my little piece as evocative and poetic as this excerpt.

Amelia Ah You’s BIO is here:>
Amelia Ah You’s website is here:>