TGIF!!!! I hope you are enjoying a lovely Friday, and making a relaxing entrance into your weekend!
So, I wanted to share the following:
Scrápate.com began publishing an online magazine back in July 2008. The 4th edition of this magazine included a full-on interview with yours truly!
I was thrilled and honoured to be asked for an interview, and it was great fun to be able to give MHO on a wide range of scrap-related (and otherwise) topics, as well as talk about the move into my new studio and the activities that are taking place therein!
Thank you so much, Scrapate, for your interest, support and all your hard work in the promotion of Scrapbooking in Spain!
It's taken me awhile to get around to translating it, but I asked their permission to publish an English version of the interview, so here goes.
I hope you enjoy it. :)
AN INTERVIEW with LISA MITCHELL
“Discovering Lisa E. Mitchell”
"Lisa Mitchell is an uncomplicated, relaxed, cheerful woman who is always ready to lend a helping hand. She has recently converted one of her passions into a day-job, with the creation of her studio as a doorway to learning, through various disciplines which serve to assist people in their own self-improvement, whether on a personal level or artistically. 
In her Gavà (Barcelona) studio, she offers classes and workshops in Scrapbooking, one area of her artistic interest and expertise. However, she also offers up her studio space to host a variety of workshops. Recently, we had the opportunity to meet Dina Wakley (Arizona, USA) there, and will soon be participating in workshops with Nathalie Kalbach (Hamburg, Germany) – both internationally recognized Scrapbooking artist-instructors.
Through these endeavours, Lisa is making her own, very positive contribution to Scrapbooking in Spain. Her engaging personality helps encourage newcomers to take part. Let’s get to know her a little better…."
Hi! I’m Lisa. I’m 40 years old, married and mother of an almost-five year old daughter. We live in Gava (20 km from Barcelona), Spain. I’ve been living here for more than 12 years; however, I was born and raised in Canada; near the city of Regina, capital city of the province of Saskatchewan.
I grew up in a small town, population of about 1500, located in the middle of the Canadian prairies (if you’ve ever seen the movie “Dances with Wolves”, that’s pretty much what it looks like where I’m from!).
In terms of my background, up until the birth of my daughter, I was working as a Technical Translator. However, I worked for many years in education and training (public primary/secondary; Special Education; Adult Education). However, I think the job I enjoyed most was my experience working as an Archivist, in the University of Regina Archives, back in my hometown in Canada.
S_ Hi, Lisa. Tell us a bit about how you started Scrapbooking.
Formally, I started in 2006, when my daughter began to become a bit less dependent on me; I began to experience a new creative urge that up until that point had been completely occupied with the experience of raising my daughter. All of the sudden it was as if my hands started tingling, and I needed to do some thing with them. Just think, I could have gone and peeled potatoes! Ha ha!
But no, given the various interests and hobbies that I have always been interested in—writing, photography, calligraphy, book binding and paper arts in general—it was a very natural direction for my interest to focus on Scrapbooking. I started with a few layouts and albums which I shared on several international online Scrapbooking forums. Then I started experimenting with other projects. They were always very well received, and I made some great international virtual contacts. Then, when the first online Scrap forum was created in Spain, I began sharing my work with the local scrapbooking community here. And the rest, as they say, is history ;)
S- You have a very “free” scrap style; who were your teachers?
I remember that in the beginning, I used to spend a lot of time exploring the galleries in the more well-known Scrap forums in the US, and some of the English-speaking blogs, just checking out “who was who” and “who was doing what”, and just generally saturating myself with different styles, products and techniques. But I never really followed the “famous faces” in the scrapbooking world, simply because I was never really attracted to one style in particular. I even got to a point when I began to wonder if I wanted to stick with scrapbooking, as the more saturated I got with what was out there, the more it all started to look “status quo”: meaning that things began to look too much like what the big designers, or the American magazines were doing, and everyone was using the same stuff and the same techniques…And that started to bore me.
However, luck would have it that I stumbled upon the work of Canadian Scrapbooking artist and designer, Gloria Froese, who as it seemed to me, pretty much kept herself apart from the more commercial aspects of the Scrap world. I would even go so far as to say that she has always displayed a radical attitude toward the whole business. Her style reflects that, at any rate. I thought her work was amazing. I had never seen anything like it.
And her example and attitude shown in her work encouraged me to not throw in the towel, and to keep with it, convinced of my own original style.
S- You seem to really like using the Ranger “Distress Inks” in your workshops. What is it about them that you like so much?
The Distress Inks offer an effect that I really like, whether it’s simply to give a finished look, using a particular colour, on the cut or torn edges of a project, or if it’s to give a worn, aged look…or sometimes both effects. And the Distress Inks are usually used in styles known in the scrapbooking world as “grunge” or “vintage” or “shabby chic”, which I suppose if I were to define my work as being of a particular style, I tend more toward those.
And the techniques with Distress Inks are just simply a lot of fun: the fact that you can take a new, plain shipping tag and turn it into something that looks like it just fell out of a medieval manuscript, or that sparkles and looks magical. You can give it different layers of colour and textures. And once you start stamping on it…oh, don’t get me going on stamping techniques or I’ll never be able to stop! ;)
S- In your opinion, you would say that Scrapbooking is a way to express oneself. Does it bother you that this aspect sometimes falls by the wayside?
When people make a big deal about what products are used in a particular project, or if the papers and products are the “latest and greatest”, or when I observe that a particular designer’s work is all over the place, then yes, it does urk me because it does seem to appear that it’s not so much about people expressing themselves through their work.
S- It looks like Scrapbooking is becoming more well known in Europe, and already now in Spain, people are starting to specialize in this hobby. This creates a tendency for people to always want to be “in the know”, and to want to have the latest, and be familiar with the newest designers. It’s unavoidable. Do you think there’s any way around that? Do you think that the speed in which information arrives could possibly destroy the essence of Scrapbooking?
I think that if the essence of Scrapbooking is to create layouts, albums and other projects with your photos with the objective of “immortalizing” what is meaningful for you in those photos, I don’t think there is anything that can be threatened by the aforementioned, so long as you stay true to the essence of what scrapbooking is for you. That said, I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to have the latest and greatest, or knowing all about the most popular designers…But if those aspects take priority over your objective in the project—which, as we said before, is to express yourself through the creative process—then I think that Scrapbooking becomes something other than a hobby through which we express ourselves creatively and that we simply enjoy doing.
In Spain, I think that we have the advantage that we can observe other countries where scrapbooking has been around longer—like the USA, of course, and the UK, and even now France—and decide if we want to follow those trends and styles or maybe perhaps we want to look for something more our own, something that uniquely reflects us. Given the fact that Spain is new to scrapbooking, I think that a “Spanish version” is still something that awaits definition, and that the styles and trends here are still focused on references outside the country.
I think it would be fantastic to see every country with its own particular style where Scrapbooking reflects something unique that originates only in those people and their culture, their creative perspective…I think that would be so much richer and creative that a style in which everyone’s work ends up looking like the latest trends and tendencies displayed by popular designers and manufacturers…don’t you agree?
S- How was Lisa Mitchell able to become known and gain a following and have her workshops sell out without doing “commercially popular” scrapbooking; without large-scale promotion, and without using the newest products, or including the “latest fad techniques”, but rather by just simply being herself? Is it possible to scrapbook (and scrapbook well) without being the “crest of the wave”?
Well, in my particular case, I think that the fact that I “live simultaneously in two worlds”, and that English is my first language helped make everything more accessible for me to get into Scrapbooking, given that I made a lot of contacts in a short time and was able to learn about many aspects very quickly: products, manufacturers, names, designs, and more importantly, the various trends and techniques.
And living here in Barcelona, I was immediately interested in sharing what I enjoyed about this hobby, and in making it accessible to people here. Given my background in teaching and facilitating, in working with the public, it was a natural transition for me to move toward teaching classes and workshops.
And I firmly believe that if you are able to do something well and are doing what you love, then there is only one way for things can go!
S- Do you think that the “boom” of American, French, and North European designers, with their impressive projects and techniques could cause many potential scrapbookers to lose interest in this hobby, after thinking that they don’t have enough “talent”?
If I have just gotten into Scrapbooking and believe that my projects need to look like those of the designers in order to be valid as “proper” scrapbooking, then yes, logically, I am going to feel discouraged. It’s the same with any other hobby or sport: we are not going to be “Messi” the first go at it. But then we need to ask ourselves a question: does that even matter?
In my case, I didn’t get into scrapbooking so that I could be published, or to become some design team member or even to gain recognition through my work. I scrap because I enjoy it, and I enjoy it the way I do it.
And we are all free to either follow what the designers do, or not give a hoot.
I think the ideal thing is to use those examples for ideas, inspiration, to learn new design aspects and techniques….Take advantage of it all! But not in order to measure our own degree of talent, or to question our ability and be bummed out by it! Never! That would be missing the whole point!
S- Who or what, in your option, makes a scrapbooking project good or bad? Or does either even exist?
I don’t like to judge other people’s work as “good” or “bad”; if I am looking at it in terms of the essence of scrapbooking that we were talking about earlier, as a means for personal expression, then I don’t think that’s the place for terms like good and bad.
However, you could think about a project in terms of how “successful” it is, according to certain criteria, say, design or artistic elements, or through a particular use of colour or composition, or that it stands out somehow in its originality…Or that it simply does what its creator intended to do: if it’s a birthday card, then simply looking at it makes me happy!
S- Artists have always been inspired by the classics or have differentiated themselves from their peers in this regard…When it comes to Scrapbooking, it seems like the amount of information and images that we find on the Internet promotes this influence: Do you think all this blogging is a good thing?
I would say the same thing that I commented previously, on the influence that the work of others has on what we create: if it serves us in a positive way, to learn from, to see new things, to be inspired by, then I don’t see a problem in it. I don’t think that a person has to have a blog in order to display and share their work either. I avoided having a blog for a long time because I thought it was status quo, but I was asked about it so many times that I finally gave in and created one. But I still don’t think that you have to follow the blogs or have one of your own if you want to call yourself a scrapbooker!
S- How do you see Scrapbooking evolve in Spain?
I have been watching it evolve here since back in 2006, with the arrival of the first B&M and online shops. In the last couple years, I have noticed quite a bit of growth, in that there have been more and more specialized shops appearing on the scene in different regions of Spain. I have also noticed that some of the more trendy paper shops and stationary stores have begun stocking scrapbooking products and papers. Also on a general scale, I also see a marked increase in the last couple of years in the number of people who are scrapbooking, through their blog presence.
Also, the number of people in Spain who are now part of a virtual community via the various Spanish forums has increased significantly, and of course this overlaps into the Latin American scrapbooking community, which is one of the wonderful things about being able to scrapbook specifically in Spanish: that it crosses many international borders and reaches a much wider community than that which currently exists here in Spain.
And yet, at the same time, I noticed that when I travelled to France last year to participate in one of the Scrap events organized there, the number of avid scrapbookers in France was visibly greater than Spain. It’s reflected in the amount and range of scrapbooking publications and magazines available in France, and in the wide variety of workshops and events organized throughout the course of the year, some of which function as rotating events around the country.
Given that France has more or less come the same route as Spain in terms of mileage—with a couple years of advantage—I would like to think that Spain will evolve in the same positive direction as France, and we can hope to see similar opportunities coming up for events and publications here in Spain.
S- Lisa, you’ve been giving workshops in different locations for some time now. Recently you have created your own (very pleasant) space in the Barcelona satellite city of Gava, where you hold workshops, invite unique artists, demonstrate other techniques and even organize session on topics that are unrelated to crafts & hobbies. Could you tell us a bit more?
The need to create my own space grew naturally out of the changes I have experienced in the last year or so. It came out of a logistical need, given that the daily challenges of being a mother, running a household and trying to work from home all got to a point that I really started to feel I needed a separate space.
And also in terms of physical space, as the workspace I disposed of was just getting too small. I was slowly taking over every square centimetre of my husband and daughter’s shelving and storage!
So, in Mid-March of 2009, I moved into my own studio. My objective in creating this space--in addition to having a place to do my own work--is to offer a variety of workshops and classes that I will facilitate and teach. But also my interest is to bring in guest artists and facilitators (both local and international) that will share their projects and knowledge with people here in Spain, not only in topics relating to Scrapbooking, but also branching out into mixed media, book binding, art journaling…and also areas of personal development as well.
For example, this past March, 2009, I brought Dina Wakley, from Arizona, USA, who gave two workshops on Scrapbooking and Art Journaling, and shared a number of her signature techniques, and this event was a great hit. Later this September, we will have the German artist Nathalie Kalbach, from Hamburg, in the studio, who will give two Prima-endorsed workshops that feature innovative techniques and materials for scrapbooking, art journaling and mixed media projects, among others.
And parallel to the creative activity in the studio, one other direction that has come out of my own interest (in my various roles as mother, partner and my own “individual quest”) is in organizing workshops in areas of personal development. For example, last May, 2009, I brought in a Certified Facilitator,
Brianda Domecq, to do an Intensive Weekend Workshop in “
Byron Katie’s The Work”, and I hope to continue doing more workshops in The Work.
I am also interested in things like creating a Women’s Group for mothers: as a safe, intimate space where we can gather and talk, share, listen and be listened to…or simply be in the company of other women. I think that a space of this kind is very needed in society.
And of course I would like to take advantage of any opportunity I can think of to weave together these two directions in the studio, with activities in specific areas, such as facilitating experiences for women to get in touch with their creativity, to create and exhibit work with other mothers…And of course I am interested in facilitating creative experiences for all ages, from little ones (the fairy-mermaid-princesses!), to adolescents, and older people.
I see such a great need for people of all ages to have the opportunity to have more contact with their own creativity. And yet, I don’t see very many places in which people can do it. And there are so many wonderful projects and experiences to do!!
Thanks, Lisa. We hope to see you soon in one of the workshops! We wish you the best of success!!
Thank you, Scrapa’t, for your interest in my work.
And congratulations on all your efforts to ensure that Scrapbooking “keeps on keepin’ on” here in Spain! See you soon!
*****
