Hi and welcome to Art Juice. This is honest, generous and humorous conversations to feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me, Louise Fletcher.

And today Alice is taking a break and I'm joined by my special guest, Salianne Ashley, who's been on the podcast before.

Hi, Sally Ann. Hello, hello,

lovely to be here. Thank you for having me back. So Sally Ann is a painter. She's a teacher.

She teaches online and in person. Do you teach in person or is it all online at the moment?

Mostly online at the moment. Yeah. And we've had quite a few conversations because you teach a course and I'm currently teaching a course around

the topic we want to talk about today. So I thought Sally Ann would be the perfect guess for this,

which is I wanted to talk about developing our ideas and nurturing ideas and kind of having something

that our art is about or is inquiring into or is, you know, has a focus. And I'm, the reason it came up, Sally Ann, is I'm currently

teaching this course, which isn't open or anything, it's in process. And one of the thing,

and what we're doing is that I'm teaching everyone how to have a focus and then all sorts of

different exercises and ways you can practice painting around

that focus to find your way to something that you're interested in. And it's interesting how

much of a challenge it is for so many people to even find a focus.ing on what they're interested in.

Once they get something, it's easy to follow the assignments I'm giving them, but it's like

the very idea of a focus or a reason for painting is something that they've never considered.

And so I guess my first question to you is, because I know that you always have

something that you are looking into or painting about or exploring, have you always worked that

way or is that something you discovered along the way? No, I haven't always worked like that at all.

And actually I came to working like that after feeling, like stuck in my work and probably needing just a little, not saying necessarily like big themes or anything, but just something to guide my focus on.

You know, so yeah, I think because I've always worked

intuitively through the years and that's all I knew, you know, just pitch up at my surface

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