Once I looked at you for a year: Part 1

 © Monique Pelser between now and then

I first picked up a camera when I was a little girl visiting my paternal grandmother on weekends.  Aleta had bright blue eyes and a neat dark black bob cropped around her face.  She was a meticulous woman who used to say anything can be done with a little elbow grease and she would laugh and say you can't just say hello you have to give it a bit of a hello how are you doing.  She loved keepsakes and newspaper clippings and recorded all events.  We used to often have a group family portrait taken to mark our visit to her flat in Pretoria.  I started to take them.  

My maternal grandfather Paul was an architect and my pen pal. We wrote back and forth for a while and he showed me an atlas and got me into collecting stamps and once to impress him I took the 110  negatives from my last shoot of moody grey clouds and our most recent outing and I cut them like stamps and posted them to him.  A stern reply returned to me saying you NEVER cut your negatives.  And so began my relationship between my urges to cut and fuck things up and still stick within the confines of the rules of a particular medium.

When I started to take pictures more professionally it was the content I was looking at - I was too fast, too hungry if not greedy to experience as much as I possibly could.  It was only in 2008 when my friends Toast Coetzer and Samantha Reinders took me on one of their trips - doing a travel story for the magazine they worked for - that I sat with Toast in the pan at Sossusvlei in the dunes of the Namibian desert observing how the shadow of a tree moved during a sunset. Something changed in me that evening and I started a long journey of learning to look at and feel light.  After that trip I pulled an anxious camera off of my forehead and I starting to make observations.  Now when I need to rest and cut off from the chaos I turn to the light.  

Here is a link to a Song by Toast Coetzer and the Buckfever Underground When the Light Goes: https://thebuckfeverunderground.co.za/music/saves/

https://www.instagram.com/moniquepelserstudio/

Drawing is by it's very nature process orientated. You start with a mark which becomes a line and develops into an image. Making drawings you are therefore processing. Hi my name is Monique Pelser I am a South African artist, producer, researcher, educator, creative recovery coach and Chi Gong practitioner. 

I teach drawing as a skill as well as a wellness practice to children as well as adults. https://www.facebook.com/doodlesdailydrawings/

On this channel I share the experiences and insights I have gained in my life and research process. 

The methods I use are breathing, drawing and writing and are used to support self-awareness, mindfulness, self-development as well as creative problem solving. I am the co-founder of The Art Of Wellbeing, an organisation working with multi-disciplinary researchers focusing on well-being practices for individuals as well as the corporation.