Around The World In 80 Ways ©mofox

The pictures accompanying each blog are mixed media collages, all done the ‘old fashioned way’ – cutting and sticking and placing, with no photoshop or digital trickery bar a bit of cropping.

The red thread that runs through most of them stands for several things.  When I first started using it in conjunction with my strategic consulting business, it represented the ball of red thread Ariadne gave Theseus to find his way out of the maze – a simple but totally ingenious solution that allowed him to get out of a fix and save the day after killing the minotaur.  Now that my focus is more specifically on the area of creative and studio thinking, I see it more as a kind of bloodline – a thread of ingenuity that runs through every person, linking us to each other, allowing us to grow and enabling us to progress as a species.  There is also a wonderful old Zen saying that maintains that there is a red thread that links together all the people who are meant to connect in this life, and that while the thread may stretch and tangle, it will never break.  This appeals to me too.

Maybe it’s a combination of all three – and maybe all three are actually different angles on the same thing…  Of course the truth is that I adopted it because I like it.  There is something both strong and fragile about it,  it can be something to follow and something that contains, it links things together and it adds energy to anything I include it in.  So now it sort of represents the thread that runs through everything I do, and is one of several motifs (fish, keys, maps and wings being others) that make cameo appearances in most of my artworks.