Creativity Released by Andrew Ballard

On The Benefit of Comfort

There is a lot to be said about having a comfortable place to go. For me, it’s my red armchair. Most of my writing and digital art happens from there. 

Living with a rare and chronic disease, daily nausea, cramps, bone pain, joint and muscle pain, gut problems, headaches, PTSD, anxiety and depression, I often retreat to the embrace of the red armchair.

It was from this place of chronic disarray, impacted by COVID restrictions, that just over a year ago, at the tender age of sixty, I found my creative side.

I started to write somewhat prolifically, a few short stories and lots of poetry. This productivity coincided with my digital doodling becoming full-on abstract digital art.

On Poetry

Throughout my life, I’ve admired and somewhat envied talented people who could paint, sing, play a musical instrument or write. For me, poetry was a flowery thing requiring a dictionary to understand strange words. It therefore never appealed to me, so to be a year down the track, having had multiple poems published in journals, blogs, online newspapers and read on the radio, and having some of my art exhibited in galleries, is surreal.

Now, I find poetry a great way to tell a story or explain something, as in this poem, ‘I Look OK’, one of my earliest about the rare disease I have.

Poetry over this last year hasn’t been one-sided. I’ve found great enjoyment in reading other poets’ works. I joined Friendly Street Poets and, with my wife, went to a few open mics at Goolwa. There we met a wonderful and charismatic man, Nigel Ford. He is a wonderful poet and has been very encouraging to new poets.

I don’t go to many poetry events due to my poor health, but for several months I was involved in a weekly Zoom poetry workshop with a group of poets in New Jersey, USA. Here I the first poem I had published in Pinky Thinker Press, Mignolo Arts Group, New Jersey.

One of the first poets I read was Geoff Goodfellow. His writing inspired me. A few months after my writing started, I was very fortunate to have a phone conversation with Geoff, who was very encouraging and gave me a few tips.

I’m a storyteller who has a lot to learn. However, after a long life, I have a lot of words trying to escape. So hopefully, I will be writing for some time to come.

Over Last Year

Abstract digital art, sometimes combined with photo manipulation, has exploded with colour over the last year. From digital doodling, I’ve created brightly coloured abstracts like those below. Art and writing have been therapeutic for both my physical and mental health.

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What I Write

I’m sixty-one years old, a husband, son, proud father, and grandfather. While a lot of what I write is about life and actual events, albeit somewhat patchwork, I’m not yet quite prepared to write about some things.

Last winter, I emerged from boredom and depression when a counsellor suggested that I look for something to do as a hobby. Working with my hands like woodwork or some craft was very quickly ruled out as I have ten thumbs and would have lost fingers.

So, I joined the University of the Third Age (U3A) online. The first course that caught my eye was about writing creatively. I thought I could try that. In my first effort, I sat down and wrote a concise story, a bit over seven hundred words, about a crazy Irish guy I had known in the Navy.

I started writing poems when I learned that poetry didn’t have to be flowery and rhyming but could be a conduit to tell a tale. The floodgates opened, and in just one year, I wrote over two hundred poems.

In addition to my health, I’ve written about life events. For example, a poem entitled, ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong’, emerged from the time when my wife and I were swept out to sea with friends in our kayaks. We had to be rescued by sea rescue and ended up in the news.

“Sorry To Say” is the title of a poem written about a friend we took in and cared for in his last eighteen months of life before he died from bowel cancer. Last year a different friend died from a stroke in her fifties, way too young. I wrote this little poem.

Poems and Art are My Life

‘Love Me Forever is the title of a poem I wrote for my wife based on when she agreed to marry me sitting next to a campfire on the bank of a creek in the Flinders Ranges where we had witnessed a flash-flood a few hours earlier.

After pumping out poems, I first posted them to Facebook then set up my first Instagram account, where my digital art took off. I used the art as a background for poems and ended up with an Instagram following. The poetry didn’t take off, but the art certainly did.

Earlier this year learned of a weekly veterans’ art group. As I served in the Royal Australian Navy for over 11 years, I was eligible, and the group encouraged me to exhibit my art. I’m also learning about other art forms like flow painting and mosaic’s which I enjoy even with ten thumbs. I wrote ‘Bloom’ to honour this group.

I haven’t found it easy to write about myself. But, writing about it in poetry feels like I’m writing outside of myself, freeing me up to release the words. So maybe as I continue, I’ll be able to explore the more challenging parts of my life poetically. 

AUTHOR BIO