|
I have been thinking about the one thing that I feel is essential to our creative process and emotional resilience as artists. As always when I pose a question to myself like this, information often arrives from places known and unknown. It’s as if I have set an intention, made my request and now the answers are there to be discovered. It’s likely they were always there, I just wasn’t clear about what I was looking for – or how to ask the right question. And in what I have just shared is a hint to the answer of what is the one essential thing that drives the creative process. But let me tell you more about how I once again realized it’s value. The past few months I have been obsessed with painting, compelled to work and finding any stolen moment I can to be back in the studio, even if it is to only sit with the pieces I’m working on and look at them. I have just felt really engaged and somehow freed up in ways I haven’t been before. You might remember the 30 Day Sketchbook Challenge I gave myself in mid-May, where I committed to making one work in my sketchbook each day for 30 days. I invited my community to join me and it became a rich and activating experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. Around Day 19 of the Challenge I started to notice myself becoming attuned to something in this daily practice. What I was connecting with in my sketchbook work was the dialogue that was occurring between the two sketchbook pages. I was working with a two-page spread each day, working on both pages together and allowing the relationship between the pages to guide my process. I was also writing about my sketchbook practice each day and I often found myself engaged with a question that continually drove my process forward and eventually anchored it to one idea or area of investigation – the dialogue. This question was fuel for this process – the activator, the clarifier and the distiller. That is what good questions do and why they must be a part of our art practice. As the sketchbook work progressed and I neared the completion of the 30 day commitment, I decided to take this idea of “the dialogue”, which I was still deeply engaged with, and scale that up by beginning a series on panel. I decided to do 10 paintings, with two panels in dialogue with each other and replicating the process I used in my sketchbook. The panels were 18 x 24 inches, so similar proportions to the sketchbook pages, and not a typical proportion for me to work with. Once all the panels were prepared – sealed, primed and mounted with paper – I began to add paint, loosely following the process I used in the sketchbook work. I had plenty of nicely sized collage papers at the ready as well, as they were a big part of the approach I was working with. All seemed to be going pretty well and I had two panels coming along, with a few layers of paint and collage. Then something happened and I stalled. I had ten panels on the wall, all waiting for me, and I was feeling an all too familiar sense of resistance. It was true I hadn’t been working as much due to my commitment to my 12-week online program The Artist Mindset, which had just completed. But the 30 Day Sketchbook Challenge was my re-entry strategy and I felt really ready to dive in now, so what the heck was this?
|
