The creative muse has been absent from my studio for quite some time now. People ask me all of the time, “How do you stay motivated?”. I reply about creativity being a practice, about having “transition” things to do in the studio that will lead to other creative ventures, etc. But for the past few months NOTHING was working for me! Finally, a good friend said “Arriving is half the battle”. And so, I went to my studio and just sat. Nothing. No urge to look at my “stuff”. No urge to straighten, no energy at all. Now, some of this is physical because I have been dealing with a B-12 deficiency and lots of low energy days. But still, I always want to make art!?!? I was beginning to feel more than a little panic! After 2 days of just sitting, I started reading some poetry. The book “Prayers of Comfort and Hope” has great poems in it if you need comfort and motivation! And that got me going a bit. I started out by just painting some pieces of textured stuff that was left from class demos. I still didn’t feel ready to tackle a plain canvas or sheet of paper. After painting scraps for a day, I started browsing around for something else that needed attention. I found a couple of canvasses that were also class demos and needed finishing. I began “poking” at them with the paint brush and finally, finally, I WAS PAINTING!!! I did 3 canvasses and the start of a 4th one. I am picturing here one that I like the way that it turned out. I don’t usually use a lot of imagery in my work. It is a LOT of work to integrate imagery in with your painting and have it have a cohesive and unified look. I think I actually made it work rather well in this collage. It is hard to tell where the figure ends and the painting begins. I will post some of the other things that I accomplished last week in the next couple of days.
I managed to have the figure feel unified with the painting!
The figure emerges from the painting and texture.
Texture detail. The texture is Golden Light Molding Paste that has been stencilled as well as some coffee and sawdust. The half circles are the pattern in some Japanese Lace Paper that was put down with Gloss Polymer Medium.
