Ep #15: Deliberately seeking out joy - with artist & illustrator Helen C. Stark

Podcast

Aug 5

I'm absolutely delighted to share my conversation with Helen C. Stark, the brilliant artist behind The Time Foragers Club on Substack. Helen's journey from postnatal depression to successful artist is both inspiring and deeply moving - she discovered her love of creating again through a local art group that literally kept her alive during her darkest moments. From there, she built an illustration career that included creating the first Edinburgh colouring book, before eventually moving to Yorkshire where she stripped everything back to focus on what truly mattered to her: colour, joy, and the practice of noticing beauty in everyday life.

What I find most captivating about Helen's work is how she's created this entire world around the concept of ‘time foraging’ - gathering moments of beauty and meaning from both the past and present. Her weekly visual journals are like love letters to the ordinary magic that surrounds us, from blackberry picking rituals inspired by her childhood in France to creating watercolours from earth pigments collected on beaches where the Brontës once walked. Her recent Ode to Charlotte collection, which sold out incredibly quickly, perfectly demonstrates how she weaves together historical inspiration, personal ritual, and artistic practice into something truly special.

Helen's approach to creativity feels revolutionary in its simplicity - she's chosen to look for joy as a deliberate act of resistance against the darkness in the world. Through The Time Foragers Club, she's building a community of people who want to carve out time for creativity and noticing. Her story reminds us that being an artist is a lifelong practice of curiosity, play, and finding beauty in the most unexpected places.

Listen to the episode here (click the arrow at the bottom right to play), or find it wherever you get your podcasts:

Find out more about Helen:

Helen is married to Mike and is a mother of three boys (12, 10 and 5). She lives in South Yorkshire on the outskirts of Doncaster where she can access woods and fields by foot. She studied Literature at university in France and was a high school teacher in Scotland for 8 years before having children. She experienced post-natal depression and went to an art group, then did freelance illustration as well as caring for her children, finding it much more flexible than high school teaching. Since then, she has been developing her creative voice. She started the Time Foragers Club in September 2024.

Visit Helen’s website
Find Helen on Instagram
Find Helen on Substack (The Time Foragers Club)

Welcome to Zuzu's Haus of Cats Presents. I'm your host, artist Eli Trier, although you can call me Zuzu. On this podcast, I talk to my fellow artists about the magic of the creative process. We'll talk about what they make and in particular, how they make it. Their rituals and workflows, inspirations and disenchantments, ebbs and flows. We'll even take a peek behind the scenes of their businesses to see how they're using their creativity there too, and how they balance the needs of their business with the needs of their art.
If you're interested in getting a behind the scenes look at what makes artists tick and enjoy conversations about art, creativity, neurodivergence and business, then you're in the right place.
Guest Introduction
Today, the Haus of Cats is so happy to present Helen C. Stark. Helen is married to Mike and is the mother of three boys. She lives in South Yorkshire on the outskirts of Doncaster where she can access woods and fields by foot. And you'll see how important that is as you listen to the interview.
She studied literature at university in France and was a high school teacher in Scotland for eight years before having children. She experienced postnatal depression and went to an art group which was where she discovered her love of creating. She then did freelance illustration as well as caring for her children, finding it much more flexible than high school teaching.
Since then, she has been developing her creative voice and she started her Substack, The Time Foragers Club, in September of 2024. I'm so excited to introduce you to Helen.
The Interview
Eli: Welcome to Helen Stark. Helen, I am so delighted to have you here in the studio with me today. Virtual studio, I should say. Thank you so much for being here.
Helen: Well, thank you for having me. I love your studio. I can see it - no one else can see it, but I can see a beautiful cat in the background. It's very vibrant. Love it.
Eli: Thank you. Thank you so much. Why don't we kick off with you telling us a little bit about your background, how you got started as an artist, who you are and what you do in the world, basically.
Helen's Background and Early Life
Helen: I'm 44. I'm Helen. I'm married to Mike. I've got three boys under the age of 12. They keep me very busy, I can imagine. I was born in Northern Ireland in 1981, grew up in France. When I was five, my parents - my dad's a pastor and he was part of the reform Presbyterian Church, which decided that they wanted to have missionaries in France.
My mom's a physiotherapist and she was working in the hospital in Northern Ireland. We all moved to France - me and my brother moved to France. We were in Paris for two years where they learned French. I was put straight into a French speaking primary school, which was completely brutal.
Then we moved down to Nantes, which is on the west coast of France. That was when I was seven. My sister was born in Paris. So there were three of us in the end. I grew up in France in a kind of third culture. I wasn't completely Irish and I wasn't completely French. Me and my siblings, we were that kind of identity core culture.
We speak to each other in French even now, years later when we meet up. We can't really speak in English to each other. It doesn't feel right. It's really funny. I grew up in France, did my university - I did literature in the university of Nantes. I did a little time in Canada and that's why my accent's a little bit mixed. People still think I'm maybe Canadian, maybe American and it's because during that time when I was there in Ottawa - this was 2004 - that was the first time I really had to work really hard at my English.
Because up until then I was speaking French. If I couldn't find a word in English, I would just flip back to French with my siblings and my parents because this was us. This was our bilingual kind of disjointed, crazy, chaotic family.
All of a sudden in Canada, even though Ottawa specifically is very bilingual, my flatmates were not bilingual. They were only English speaking. That did something to my brain where I was like, "Oh my goodness, I have to actually finish my sentences in English. This is really hard." You probably wouldn't guess that now from my accent. I mean, I've definitely improved, but up until that age, French was my language of choice. That's the language I was most comfortable with.
Moving to Scotland and Teaching
Then I moved to Canada. I loved that so much. I thought I'm going to become a teacher. Then I came back to France and I decided to apply to become a teacher in Scotland because I'd been there as a tourist. I loved Edinburgh. So I applied for Edinburgh, got in and this was me leaving my home, my base.
Moved to Edinburgh, was a student there for a year, then got a job as a teacher. I loved Edinburgh, fell in love, head over heels. I had just such an amazing life there. I found an amazing church. I felt very loved in a wonderful community. I loved teaching. It was hard, being a French and German teacher. There were definitely challenges, but I did love the job.
Then I met Mike, who is completely Scottish, 100% Scottish, completely different from me. I'm more of an emotional person, whereas he's much more calm. Very different. But we met and very quickly got married and had our first child.
Postnatal Depression and Finding Art
During that nine months of my maternity leave, I wasn't sure whether or not I was going to go back or not. But I had postnatal depression. The pregnancy - we had a miscarriage before as well. That was really tricky, very heartbreaking. So Nathan's pregnancy was quite emotionally difficult for me. Then when he arrived, actually the time at the hospital was very traumatic for me as well. It just wasn't good.
So how I became an artist - this is the whole story of how I got into art again, because I grew up loving art, drawing. I would be the one making Christmas cards. I just loved drawing. I was always part of a club that was doing art and I loved art history. At university, I would actually pop into the university courses, because in France, the amphitheatre is big and massive and basically no one checks who comes in and you're actually allowed to go into other classes. So I would go into the prehistoric art classes and all these amazing art history classes incognito basically, and just listen.
Even throughout university, I was sucking up all of this information. But it was nearly like it was all dormant. When this happened, when I had postnatal depression, it got so dark and everything got so difficult. Survival was hard. I found this arts group that was part of the community locally and they basically kept me alive because they had childcare organised for two hours. They brought you a cup of tea and a biscuit. They had all the materials and they had an art teacher there.
Eli: What a lifeline.
Helen: Yeah, completely. Can you imagine like for someone who's going through probably the hardest time of her life to come to this art group and for them to just take - I mean, I've got goosebumps even thinking about it just now.
So that was once a week and it just kept me going. It was like I was coming back to life. After a while, some people were saying, "Oh, you should really sell your art. You could sell your art." At this point in time, financially, things were quite hard for us. Mike is a youth worker and he's never going to earn a lot.
Because I had resigned from teaching, I made that decision that the teaching chapter was coming to an end and I resigned mainly because of childcare and because actually it wasn't negotiable. I couldn't have part-time at the time. It was going to be too difficult and it was on the other side of town. So I was going to have to drive over and waste all that time and we didn't have family nearby. My parents were back in Ireland at this point.
So I developed like an art practice. I just got a sketchbook and I started drawing and then it was like a snowball effect after that. It became more than a hobby. It became something that I could actually get a little bit paid for here and there.
The Edinburgh Colouring Book Breakthrough
Then something happened, which was just one of these kind of magical moments where I was walking around Waterstones, pushing the pram. I saw Zoë de las Cases. I don't know if you've heard of her. She's an artist illustrator. She had colouring books. There were three. I can't remember the exact - I think there was Tokyo colouring book, maybe Paris, maybe New York. But I remembered flipping through that really quick thinking somebody has got to do that for Edinburgh, surely. Edinburgh is such a touristy place.
So I went back home and I Googled it and I could not find an Edinburgh colouring book. Then I thought, I'm just going to sketch a few things and I'm going to just contact publishers and who cares? We'll just see what happens. It'll be fun.
I literally did the drawings. I did maybe four or five, called some publishers. I Googled publishers, Edinburgh. A few people said, "Oh, sorry, we don't do colouring books. We do science books." You just move on to the next. It was literally just one day I thought, I'm just going to call these people.
One person called back, so the head of publishing house called back at the end of that day, having seen my drawings because the person that got the phone call said, "Yeah, just send the drawings." This head of the publishing company called me back saying, "We're very interested. When can we meet?" We met for coffee and got a contract in place.
Eli: What???
Helen: Then there was maybe three months, four months maybe of me working on it. It was over a hundred pages of Edinburgh. Mainly architecture, but it was in the seasons. I had a very clear outline. I wanted some scenes of Edinburgh in the winter, scenes of Edinburgh in the spring, in the summer, in the autumn, and all the things like kilts and wellies and silly things as well involved in there. I had friends who would be my models.
It was like a bit of a golden era because I would get up early - I would get up earlier than seven, but my husband would look after the kids and I would draw for about an hour. Then I would take over looking after the kids. Then he would go to work. He would come back. And then the evening I would have a bit more time to draw. During the day, I would just go into town and take the pictures as references and do the drawings with my kids. They loved being out and about.
That was a really lovely time. Then things escalated work-wise after that word of mouth. I got lots of interest in jobs from there in Edinburgh.
Moving to Yorkshire and Starting the Substack
Eli: So when did you start the Substack? Because that's where I know you from is your incredible visual journals.
Helen: Fast forward several years, really the Substack. We moved down to Yorkshire about seven years ago, again, for my husband's work. That was a really tough time to move away from Edinburgh because a lot of my work was around Edinburgh. It was very much my muse. Even down to the Instagram and just all the inspiration, everything was Edinburgh related. Then the word of mouth and the networking and all of that. So it was a very difficult time. It was actually quite a big sacrifice to move down to be with him and the family.
But Doncaster just meant that it pulled away all the extras and it was very raw and there was only the raw stuff that was left and that was colour. I got much more involved in my analysis of colour and played a lot more and it was the playfulness - and I know you love playfulness as well.
That coincided with having the third child Ezra and COVID and playing, playing, playing, doing a lot of mess in my sketchbooks. I took a complete time off Instagram I think for two years off Instagram entirely, so really trying to just love art and understand what is it that I want to be doing. Edinburgh's behind us, we can't continue that. What is left?
And it was colour.
Substack - I was wanting to have a club of some sort. For a long time, I wasn't sure between Patreon and Substack and I was thinking a lot about it. I had a few conversations with a few key people really who encouraged me down the route of Substack. Samantha Dion Baker, Anna Wilson, Beth Spencer, who really helped me to move towards Substack.
Really the idea was to start doing things that people would see but without necessarily having a club. So that was the visual journals. I thought well that's easy for me. It's part of my routine. I love doing it so let's just do it on Fridays, post it on Saturdays and then maybe at some point when I feel ready, I'll have a club.
So that's what I did beginning. January 2024 was when I started my first visual journal. I did that the whole way through the whole year. I'm continuing that ritual this year as well. But the actual club, I started in September. So not even a year yet.
The Time Foragers Club
Eli: And that's The Time Foragers Club, which is such a beautiful name. I'm curious, how did that name come about? What does time foraging mean to you?
Helen: So there's several elements. I wanted time to be part of it because when I - I don't know about you, since we're the same age, it's really interesting, actually, you can tell me what you feel about it. But for me, turning 40 was a bit of a funny one because I've always felt quite young in my head. All of a sudden you're thinking about statistics, you think, well, this is - I'm actually entering my second half, the second half of my life. What do I want to do? What is this life about?
Eli: It's a great galvaniser.
Helen: It's just like, I need to make a plan. Let's just do something that makes sense to me that I really am passionate about. Let's put my whole self into this. Let's stop wasting time. And that was a very big kind of manifesto in my head - stop wasting time, Helen. So the word time had to be part of it.
As well, time is great because I love heritage. I love anything that's secondhand - antique shops and old paper and I love culture and language and the history of language, the history of art and literature and so all of that is the past. It's what people have given us from the past - the Brontës and Alcott and all these things. But then there's also time is also the future and it's like these next 40 years. It might be one year, but it could be 40. So let's just make the most of it.
The foraging was more to do with - it's a hint to, of course, foraging. I love foraging. I love the resourcefulness of getting things from the planet that's already there. You don't need to go to the supermarket to get your blackberries. Just go get your blackberries. Just look for the hedgerows.
From a very young age, we as a family used to get blackberries locally and then as a teenager I would actually have blackberry parties. We would have friends just come to our house then we would go and collect the blackberries and come back and then make crumbles. It would be like a whole day event, a whole afternoon evening and we would go into the evening and we would have dinner and then the crumble and it would just be such a lovely celebration of that time of year. It's the end of August into September. It's just gorgeous time.
So that's the celebration of what the world has on offer. Since COVID really, I got into it a lot with my kids and we would make elderflower cordial and elderberry ink and all of these different things that we've researched and it's been something that we've loved doing as a family. Just recently I've been making my watercolours and oil painting as well with earth pigments so it's different type of foraging. It's more like gathering but it's still that kind of sense of there's things that are here that we can use. Let's use them. We don't need to get things exported from a million miles away.
There is a hint to that. But really the idea with the club is the fact that we don't want to waste time. We want to carve out that time to be creative and let's do it together. It was very much based on the little women up in the attic in the garret, when they come together and they have fun and they're like completely imagining this other world. They have their newspaper and so the whole club that has a gazette as well every month, I send out a gazette and I'm just having lots of fun in that with announcements and taking records or whatever, like just being silly. Sometimes I put recipes in or whatever.
Eli: I love that sort of world building that you've done with that. I mean, we were talking about my website when we just before we started.
Helen: Yeah, that's an amazing website. So colourful.
Eli: Thank you. But I think that's exactly the same vibe as what you're doing. You've created this whole world that has all of your reference points and you're brilliant at bringing that all together. Every single time you put out one of these visual journals, you're sort of adding more to the world. There is so much about the things that are happening in nature and the stuff that you're sort of foraging, metaphorically in the world, and bringing in all of those. I think you just did a whole lot of stuff about the Brontës, was it? I think you did a whole painting collection around that. It's just such a lovely place to go and feel…. I don't know, it makes me feel sort of connected to nature. It makes me feel connected to you, even though this is the first time that we're actually meeting.
Helen: Yeah, but we're going to meet in Copenhagen.
Eli: Absolutely, absolutely. And it makes me feel connected to a time I remember from my childhood when my mum used to - we would go and collect the elderflowers and there's a big bucket in the kitchen. We'd make elderflower champagne. We'd do the same thing with the blackberries, or there would be little sort of points throughout the year where certain rituals occurred. I live in the middle of a city. It's not something that I have the opportunity to do in my life now, but I love sort of reliving that experience through what you do and I'm so appreciative of what you're doing.
Helen: Oh, thank you. Well, there might be a season in the future where you can carve out time to go out for a walk and pick some elderflowers and elderberries.
Eli: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Helen: If it's something that gives you joy, you might.
Eli: I might. It's true. It's true. I think one day I'll probably retire to the countryside and have an elder tree in the backyard.
Helen: See, this is the thing. Quite often in the club we talk about things that we would love and things that actually we have but we don't have - we would love to have but we don't have. So there's that sense of maybe longing in many ways. At some point I would love to live in the countryside, like further right. Our garden is quite small, but I'm trying to do what I can with what we have. I think that is also very much the idea with The Time Foragers Club - that we want to develop the art of noticing and enjoying what there is just now and embrace these moments that we have, even when you've had their most rubbish week, when things have gone really wrong and you've had a lot of bad news and there's been a lot of grief or lots of struggles, there's still things that you can see. There's things that you can look out for and appreciate as being beautiful and joyful and you can pause and enjoy those things even though the rest of everything has gone pear-shaped.
The Practice of Looking for Joy
Even doing that and getting into the habit of doing that helps you to cope with the spiralling of negativity that can so easily happen to all of us. Some people are more melancholic I guess than others. I would probably call myself naturally melancholic so I have to - in many ways this kind of ritual of the visual journals, it helps me to look out for those things and that's kind of like my posture in many ways is to look out for the good, like look out because otherwise, life really sucks.
Eli: Especially at the moment when the whole world is just going crazy.
Helen: I don't think I haven't recorded this yet in my visual journals. I think it's okay for me to say this, but on Sunday we had a barbecue and we had two Iranians and an American and we were just having a barbecue and then we went to the field and we played football and Mike and I just looked at each other and we were like, this is good. This is a good thing. I'm getting emotional. I know Iranians and they're going through a really tough time. Sorry.
Eli: No, it's fine. It's fine.
Helen: It's just life is hard and a lot of people - it's very hard and we can choose to look for the good and to look for the beautiful. I think some people see my visual journals and think, she's having the best of life, like just her life is always gorgeous. I am trying to just pick the best things really and focus on the good things because they are gorgeous. But it also teaches my brain to dwell on the good things. It's like a therapy nearly for myself and my own mental health.
Eli: I think the practice of looking for joy is actually a revolutionary act. In a world where we are expected to be miserable, we are expected to be beaten down, the powers that be want us to be small and terrified, to look for joy, to celebrate the moments when we can. I think that is an absolute remarkable thing to do. And I think it's remarkable that it's something that you're not only doing for yourself, but you're sharing that joy with with the rest of us as well. I think that's a really special and important thing to be doing, particularly at this point in human history.
Social Media and Technology
Helen: Yeah. There's a lot of chat about social media and for teens especially, potentially banning social media for teenagers. I think I would probably be in favour of that. But for example, I think there's quite a lot of good things that can come from social media. I would probably put The Time Foragers Club sort of in that - there's a lot of social media in The Time Foragers Club, but I think it's really what you do with all of these things.
As long as you can have kind of control over it, I was even talking about this with a friend the other day, if you can leave your phone in a basket most of the time, and then especially not at night. Don't take your phone into your bedroom with you. Make your bedroom a sanctuary so that you can sleep well and you're thinking and you're dreaming and you're not scrolling. Maybe have times when you can scroll and enjoy scrolling and get ideas and be creative. I think there can be scrolling that can be creative and it can be good.
But I think social media has had a little bit of a - people are quite critical of it and then they feel guilty scrolling but I don't think you need to feel guilty as long as you're just doing it at that moment in time and you're enjoying it and maybe just stop eventually, you know, and move to your other things and do them well, do one thing at a time.
Sometimes I feel like, oh, what if I'm encouraging people to be on their phones a lot? Hopefully, I just don't want to be part of a big machine.
Eli: No, I think everybody has their own responsibilities, don't they? I completely appreciate what you're saying. And I think it comes down to the intentionality. I mean, the way that I use social media and things these days is I have particular people that I love and I will go and I will seek them out and look at what they're up to. It's a beautiful, joyful, connective thing for me, rather than what I used to do, which is just accept whatever is being pumped into my eyeballs at that particular time, which is what I hated about what happens at Instagram because all of a sudden it stopped being about the people that I was interested in and the people I cared about. And it started being all adverts, suggested posts, stuff that I wasn't interested in, but I was addicted to just that thing. And it was horrible and it made me feel bad. And now what I do now makes me feel good and happy. Your website is just so interactive and I'm so glad that that's a place where people are coming to and they're spending time on because it's just such a vibrant website. I just love it.
Helen: Have you ever tried on social media, on Instagram specifically, but clicking on the not interested thing?
Eli: Yeah, I tried every hack under the sun and then I deleted my account and my life got infinitely better.
Helen: Well, see, that's the thing. So, I mean, I think there's definitely times when it's good to be just off. Like, I said, I was just completely off for two years when my third was born and no regrets there.
Eli: And the thing that I love is that it hasn't impacted my business. It hasn't impacted my ability to connect with people. My relationships are fewer but deeper. And I have so much more of myself in my own brain, if that makes sense. I can actually think deeply and spend time staring into space. And that's where all the good ideas come from.
Vulnerability in Visual Journals
Eli: So one thing that I'm interested in is that these visual journals that you share are often very personal. And I wonder if they feel vulnerable to share. If there's ever a time where there's something that you would like to put in your journal for you, but maybe you censor yourself because you know it's going out to what, 11,000 people or something.
Helen: Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I think the honest answer is I focus on what has given me joy that week and very often it's something very colourful. I focus on drawing that. Then I focus on putting in the dates and the activities. It's just kind of more activity focused rather than feelings focused. Then there might be some quote from a movie or from a novel or something that I'm interested in or a podcast that I write down. I letter because I love lettering.
Very quickly you fill up the page. So there's antiques that I'm interested in, architecture. I love landscapes. I love still life. There's a certain amount of things that are always kind of on my radar. Very quickly, I just fill up these pages with things that I love and that I have loved that week. And it is to do with the chronology of the pictures I take and the experiences I have.
Yes, I do tend to not include my family too much. I just feel like they have their own lives and I don't really want to share too much about them because it's kind of public and maybe they don't want - they always say to me, "Mom, we want to be YouTubers. So go ahead and tell the world about us." But I kind of just don't, I just want to protect them a little bit and just not draw too much attention to them. But they're very cute and very often I'm like, "Oh my goodness, this is so cute. I would definitely get so many likes on this one." But no, I just don't.
As well, something - I mean, I shared this with you as well. I'm a Christian. I have very often I have thoughts where I'm just like, "Wow, that's amazing" or something that I read in the Bible or some promise from the Old Testament that's fulfilled in the New Testament. And I just think, "Wow, this is amazing." Especially around Easter time or Christmas time, there's - Christmas, I love it. But there's definitely times when I think I'd love to say more, but at same time, I don't want to - I just don't want to alienate people. I don't want to. I'd rather people were comfortable within what I'm doing and then I'm just going to share a little bit here and a little bit there. I'm not going to be like preachy preachy.
But one of the big things that I do believe, which kind of encapsulates all the things that I do is the fact that I believe fundamentally that we're made in God's image and that we are all beautifully made and that we all have a beautiful story to tell and the diversity in this world with the cultures, the stories, the different languages, the different histories and colours and just, it's all diverse and so beautiful and everybody has just such a story to tell.
That really is like the fundamental belief for my journaling practices. I would love for everybody to just enjoy spending one hour a week where they just sit down and they just take note of their week. I know a lot of people do, so it's not like it's a new idea. A lot of people have done it over the centuries, but if people could spend more time journaling and less time scrolling or just like mindless. I don't know. There's also times when it's good to be mindless.
Eli: I love that. I think that's absolutely beautiful. I can totally see that coming through in your work. The celebration of the stuff of life, like the ordinary magic that's inherent in every day and the stories that surround us. I think that's beautiful.
Helen: Yeah, because like still life, I think, is very much a celebration of the everyday and the mundane.
Eli: The fact that we're surrounded by fruit and flowers and beautiful ceramics and things all around us all the time. I love still life as well. The fact that flowers exist just blows my mind on a daily basis.
Helen: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's a dahlia in my garden that just came out just two days ago and it's absolutely stunning. It's just giving me so much joy. And there's another cosmos as well. This time of year, the sweet peas have just come out. It's just absolutely stunning.
Eli: It's a riot, an absolute riot.
The Ode to Charlotte Collection
Eli: Speaking of still life, you launched your first painting collection in May. A couple of months ago. And it sold out super fast. Tell us about that. What was that experience like?
Helen: Oh, it's so amazing. I mean everyone was just so sweet on Substack they kind of shared about the launch and because I guess I was sharing for weeks and weeks about working on still life and also I'd been to Filey and not far from Scarborough and it's a place where the Brontës would have stayed. In fact there was a plaque on one of the walls saying that Charlotte had stayed there.
So her kind of spirit was on my - she was in my mind the whole time we were there. We were there for whole weekend. I found some pigments on the beach and I collected that, gathered that. Then I was painting the landscape. I wasn't very happy with what I'd managed to do. But I was still being creative. Then we got home and I was continuing to paint and I decided I was going to do still life as much as possible, like a whole collection.
I downloaded Jane Eyre, as you know, Charlotte Brontë wrote that, on Audible. So my idea was I'm going to just paint this still life collection and listen to Jane Eyre. And it just came out of me. It was just like all of my life had - it was just, everything was dormant until that moment. And it just was like it just all came out and it was just amazing, just such an amazing feeling.
I was recording all of the process and then in the end, kind of cherry on the top was the fact that I was able to turn the Filey earth pigment into watercolours and oil paints to then include those into both the canvas work and the paperwork of the collection. So there's 35 pieces in total and they all had a little bit of the Filey beach on it, which Charlotte Brontë would have walked on. And it was just like this whole wonderful echo. So I called it Ode to Charlotte because she was definitely somebody that inspired me a lot throughout the whole thing.
Then as well, just before the launch for my 44th birthday, Mike and I got to go to the Parsonage where she grew up with her sisters and Branwell, her brother. We got to sort of visit it and we saw her little notebooks, her visual diaries, which by the way, I was just like, "Oh my goodness, all this stuff is amazing. This is like kind of similar to what I'm doing and this is awesome." So I think I'm going to go back and study it a little bit more.
But anyway, I saw her little glasses and just the whole story of the father - I think he died at something like 82 or 85 or something and he saw all of his children come and go and just such a heartbreaking story. And yet here are these amazing novels and poetry that has been passed down. And again, I've got goosebumps just thinking about it. It's just like the things that survive, the things that are passed on, the words. It's very powerful and it's beautiful. So many people around the world still love Wuthering Heights and love Jane Eyre. And that's just to name a few, but it's just wonderful.
So that was just on the run up to the - literally a day or two before the launch. So I was sharing all of this with the Substack crowd on Instagram, like, "Guys, look at this. I'm like geeking over all this Charlotte stuff." Then so the launch, it happened on a Saturday morning and it was just insane. I think I cried and danced and screamed more that day than maybe ever before.
Eli: Wow.
Helen: Maybe Bruce Springsteen gig when I was at the very front, maybe that was up there a little bit of a rival.
Eli: Yeah. I love how ritualistic that whole process was, like the research gathering and the getting the pigments from the beach and the listening to Jane Eyre. I'm obsessed with rituals and I love asking artists about their rituals. Cause they nearly always say like, "Oh no, I don't have any rituals." And then they'll come out with something that's just utter magic.
Creative Rituals and Process
Helen: I definitely have rituals.
Eli: Tell me about your kind of process for making work. Do you have a ritual around creating your artwork?
Helen: So I mean, to begin with, as I said, because I've got three boys, when they're home, that is - they're very much home and they take up space and my attention and I don't want to be that kind of mom who's half on my phone and half with them. So for a start that really is a time when I'm just with them. I mean every so often I might create a reel or something when they're watching TV or something like pulling them on the sofa whatever but in general that's my structure is that I go to school with them, drop them off, on a walk.
I don't drive, I do that unless it's like pouring. But I try, it's an intentional thing. I go for a walk there with them and we notice things on the way there and say goodbye. Then I walk back and that is my solo walk. It's very important for me to be on my own. I'm not checking my phone, but every so often I might take a picture or something I've seen or whatever, but that's really important.
Then I come home, I tend to read my Bible, pray, all these kind of things that are important to me. I try to not go onto Instagram or social media or anything, Substack or anything before I've done all of those things. So then we're talking probably start at like nine-ish. Then I kind of work through till two thirty. I try to do creative work first because I'm a morning person and that's when things are alive in me.
Past the evening I tend to kind of switch off but in the summer time I do have a bit more energy so I tend to work till 2:30, go and pick up the boys, bring them home, then I'm like full-time mom. I do cooking and all of that and take them to clubs and things like that. But then when they go to bed I would sometimes do a Zoom call. Mike would take over looking after them.
My Zoom calls in the club tend to be at seven in the evening, so BST, which tends to work for British and for people on your side and for people in America. It's not ideal for Australians and New Zealand. It's not great. So I try to change those around. But I think 7 p.m. really works quite well for me. I guess that's quite important.
But so that tends to be my routine. Then so Friday I work - I think probably because of my teaching career, which was like eight years of my life. And because before that I was school and uni and all of that, I was still kind of routine of the term and everything. I do absolutely love a weekend where I can switch off.
I try to finish my work on Friday and I try to have a day where we go exploring as a family or we have jobs to do around the house or gardening or whatever. That's on the Saturday and then on Sunday we go to church together and the boys absolutely love church which is awesome. That's just - we're at such a nice time and they aren't resentful of going to church and they have a big field where they can play football after the service and they have lots of friends and it's just a very happy time for them and for us.
Then we tend to have friends over and Mike's a youth worker at the church so his in many ways that's his working day as well so it's not as free as Saturday. So Saturdays are very much the kind of the day when we get up to our adventure day in the world.
Then as well something that I should probably mention is on Sundays I don't go online at all. So again, that's my one day where I just don't even go close to Instagram. On this past Sunday, I responded to a message on Substack on the Sunday morning. I regretted it the whole day. I just think it's just much better for me if I just leave my phone in the basket and I just get on with a full day, totally switched off. And it's just much better.
So then I have also another ritual on the Friday afternoon, I sit down and I make a little plan of what I'll do on the Monday so that when I come back from my complete switch off, it's not as hard to get back into things. I have a little list of things I can do to get back into the Monday kind of groove.
Eli: I love that. I love that. I think having kids really does kind of enforce a certain amount of structure into your life.
Helen: Absolutely.
Eli: And I kind of think that's really nice. I mean, I don't have kids, so I'm completely free and easy to do whatever I want, whenever I want, which a lot of the time is fabulous. And a lot of the time it's like, it would actually be quite nice sometimes to have a bit more kind of scaffolding that's enforced upon me. I have to build all my own scaffolding around my week, which is - so I really like that sort of, you know what's coming, you know what's going to happen, you know how long you've got to work, and you just kind of do your thing.
Helen: Not waste time.
Eli: Not waste time. Exactly. Exactly.
Final Advice
Eli: So, Helen, this has been absolutely lovely. You're such a bubbly light, wonderful personality. There's one final question that I ask everybody who comes on the podcast, which is what advice would you give to anyone who is interested in making their creativity into their full time gig? What would you tell them?
Helen: Well, that is such a lovely question and I think it's just so good to address because I think anybody who looks at an artist can think "Oh man that that person's got everything" but actually it's - first of all I don't think anybody ever arrives and then really if you're starting off I would say enjoy the process, enjoy having fun, play a lot, just - I mean you would not believe the amount of sketchbooks I have that have just got the most horrific colour combinations in it and just oh my goodness and it takes a while. There's so many materials out there, there's so much choice that it takes a while to even kind of break down what you like and what you don't like.
So I would say have fun enjoying everything. Do not put pressure on yourself. If it means that you have to have a job on the side, I would do that. Do something that doesn't take too much of your creative energy, not full-time teaching. That was not - that was a non-negotiable. I could not do that and be an artist at the same time. But so I would take the pressure off by having a job on the side that's not too difficult, but still bringing in the money because money is definitely something that's worth addressing.
I think if you are lacking in the fundamental resources in life, then it starts to affect you emotionally and in your creativity and you get stressed. And then again, this coming back to this "don't waste your time" thing that becomes - it can become a spiral and it can become - it can make it very tense. It's like, "Oh, I can't waste this time. I've only got like 30 minutes. I need to use this. I need to become a professional artist in 30 minutes because I need the money. I need this to work." But actually looking back on it now, I think it takes years.
You might find that there's some gigs that you can do on that journey. You might earn a little bit of money as you're going along and you can learn as you're going along and you can keep your thinking hat on and be analytic about what you enjoy. If you do a job and - sorry if you take like a say an illustration gig and there's something that you enjoyed about it then take note of the thing that you enjoyed but if there's anything that you didn't enjoy then take note of that thing as well so that you're basically cataloguing your experiences and you're developing this awareness of the direction in which you want to go. I think that is how you get there.
But as I say, no one ever gets there. That's the issue with the work as an artist is that some people say, "Are you a full-time artist?" And I don't really know what to say to that. It's like, well, yes, I am. But can I explain to you exactly how it works? And I would definitely say that I'm at the beginning of my art journey.
Eli: I love that. I think being an artist is a lifelong practice. It's called a practice for a reason, because we're always in a state of evolution. We're always - the curiosity is part of the gig. So there's always something you're new at. There's always something you're trying out. There's always something new to learn.
Helen: I would say that if people are struggling to actually just enjoy playing, then that's when you want to be part of a club or you want to go to that life drawing event in your town or you want to just get out of your brain. You just need to go and do the sketching. Very often that might mean meeting up with friends. I mean, the number of friends that I've met up with and we've drawn together and it doesn't really matter if you're going to do something wonderful or Instagram worthy or whatever. It doesn't matter. The point is that you're actually doing it. You're getting on with it and you're learning and you're developing your muscle memory and your awareness of what - as I say, what materials are you going to use? When are you going to use them? Why are you using them? All of these things that comes with time and practice.
Sometimes being part of a club is good. And if you're very far from anybody, then The Time Foragers Club is a great way to come and learn and just enjoy.
Where to Find Helen
Eli: So if people are interested in coming in and joining The Time Foragers Club or they want to find out more about you, where can they find you on the internet?
Helen: So The Time Foragers Club is on Substack and there's an About section on my page and you can basically understand there what happens. There's three live calls per month. So there's a journaling session, a drawing session and a creation session, which is where we all just bring our own projects and we get on with things. The last thing I did was I painted a lampshade. Everybody else got on with their own thing. And again, it's just this idea of carving out time.
Then we also - I also post out a monthly video and that tends to be like a sketchbook tour or something. It's quite short. It's like a 30 minute kind of thing. And then there's the Gazette once a month, the Gazette very Little Women inspired portfolio. What was it called? The Pickwick, the Pickwick portfolio. And that has all the news. Then if people see that they can do one date from the Gazette, which is where all the dates are announced, then they go into the exclusive to paying members club chat and that's where they sign up to a Luma link, which gives you your time in your time zone. There's people from all around the world who join, which is really fun. So it just keeps everybody right.
Eli: Fantastic. And you can find all of Helen's links in the show notes if you want to come over to the website and have a look at those.
Helen, this has been an absolute treat. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom and your just loveliness with us.
Helen: Oh, thank you so much. I can't wait for our after chat with a cup of coffee and then you're going to tell me all about your collections.
Closing
Eli: Helen's work just brings me so much joy. I just love that deep, deep connection to history and nature and the incredible way that she just seeks out joy in the ordinariness of everyday life. I think that's something that we can all take with us.
If you would like to find out more about Helen and her Time Foragers Club then do make sure to come over and check out the show notes at Zuzu's Haus of Cats. That's haus, h-a-u-s dot com forward slash podcast and you'll find all of the show notes for Helen's episode and also all of our previous episodes as well.
Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode. Bye bye!