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When Have I Suffered Enough For My Art?

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It’s OK to laugh now. I mean at me and the things I am about to reveal about myself. In the several weeks of blogging that I have done it has mostly been confined to my artistic troubles. I have let in little glimpses of myself beyond that, but it occurred to me that maybe people might want to read something a little more uplifting, well not exactly uplifting, but it might just give you cause to do that laughing I deemed permissible. For today’s project I decided to work on a small table. I’ll go into the details of it momentarily, except for now to say  that it involved using a wood burner, and it inspired tonight’s blog.

When I was twelve I slit my wrist. Before you gasp in horror let me tell you it wasn’t intentional. Crafty, artistic child that I was, I was in the process of trying to make a present for my working mother. I don’t remember exactly what I was making, but we can all assume it was a project from Highlight’s Magazine, I was an avid reader, and for those of you who are old enough to remember, I still quote Goofus and Gallant. I was cutting a bleach bottle in half with an open blade, it got stuck on the seam so I did what any brainiac would do, I slashed hard at it while holding it in my other hand. My parents were at work, so my big sister put a rubber band on my wrist to stop the bleeding. (She was a freshly turned fourteen year-old, how would she know?) Fortunately my dad came home shortly after that and took me to the emergency room. Two hours later with a butterfly bandage, because it was too late for stitches, and an interrogation by the police officer on duty who I had to convince I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I had for the first time officially suffered for my art. I bring this up because today while using my wood burner I turned to Dan and said that I couldn’t believe my parents gave me a wood burner for Christmas that same year. They gave a burning hot, searing weapon to their daughter, the daughter who accidentally slit her wrist, the daughter who had a gap between her front teeth until she tripped over her sister and smashed her face on the sidewalk, the same girl who can’t tumble, failed swimming lessons, can’t roller skate and didn’t figure out how to ride a bike until she was nine. Did anyone ever get the toy where you poured paint on a spinning device similar to a record player? I got it, spun the paint all over my bed. Stepped on a tube of acrylic paint in my teenage bedroom and shot hot pink across the olive-green carpet. I swear I have no fingerprints, they are all attached to the hot glue that I have had to pull off my burning fingers. My dad’s favorite story to tell about me to anyone willing to listen (and even those who don’t want to listen) is that I failed Phys Ed in high school. It’s true, of course my P.E. teacher is a dead ringer for the witch in the Wizard of Oz, I kid you not, I’ve got the yearbooks to prove it. Then there is of course my six knee surgeries. Tripped over a vacuum cleaner and fell down a flight of stairs, fell off a ladder, (twice) tried to hang a kitchen curtain, you get the idea. (Although Dan said he likes to tell people I did it pole dancing. Which might be possible if I could actually get on a pole) What I want to know is if suffering makes your art better, then why aren’t my paintings at the Getty yet?

Now that you all know just how pathetic I can be, I will tell you where I’m not. I took this five dollar table that I bought at a yard sale and am in the process of turning it into something I love. (I have a before photo. I’m not sure where in my pictures it is right now, but I promise to post it when I put up the finished table tomorrow) I had two ideas for it. One would have turned it into something for a kid’s room, but I went instead with an idea based on a piece of vintage fabric. Dan painted the base black for me. On the top I wood burned a floral design that I am painting with those Martha Stewart Pearl paints I mentioned before. I love, love, love them! It looks like inlaid Mother Of Pearl. I still need to draw two more of the flowers for the top and burn them. It is painstaking and time-consuming, but I love the finished look. When I am finished with the flowers I am going to add a light coat of stain.

It’s been a good day, and I only burned myself once!

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Letting Go Of Perfection

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I never know from day-to-day what I am going to create, much less what I will blog about. Both projects are discovering themselves as my day goes on. I will have to be very honest here, both the art and the writing are on the top of my daily “to do” list, but both are the last things I do at the end of the day most of the time. Why? I’m still struggling with putting myself first and letting go of my duties as wife/mother. I’m still making sure the kitchen gets cleaned in the morning, and that there are meals on the table, and every other thing I can think of in between. I’m working on it, but without much success. I will continue to figure this out, and at some point (hopefully) I’ll learn to ignore that the floor needs to be swept. (Disclosure: I can’t eat at those restaurants where they have rude wait staff and peanut shells on the floor. I cannot stand rudeness, and absolutely cannot eat in a place that has a dirty floor. I don’t know why I feel the need to share this, except that maybe it lets you know me just a little better. One might think by reading that, that I am a neat freak. Far from the truth. My house is clean, very clean, well at least as clean as a house with three cats and a twenty-two year old male can be, but I’m messy. I think I mentioned that before, I mean the me being messy part, again for no particular reason…)

I brought all of the above up because I (as regular readers might know by now) am struggling with not being good enough or perfect in my art. Tonight I had a little breakthrough. I didn’t work earlier today because of anything more than it was really hot here today, and unusually humid. Hot plus humid equal lethargic for me. I just wasn’t in the mood. Not that I didn’t try. I made a few pathetic attempts at something with clay, and although I promised to put up all work, warts and all, I didn’t even come up with something I could photograph even as an attempt. So at the magic hour of seven p.m., which seems to be turning into my starting time, I began a watercolor painting. My breakthrough was that I didn’t sweat it at all. When I do a rough sketch for a painting I worry over every little detail. I measure and fuss over the drawing being just right. I didn’t measure tonight. I just sketched, and then I just painted. In a moment I had the thought that the reality is, unless I am painting a well-known monument, the people who see my work are more than likely to never see the photo I use as inspiration, or into my brain to see where ideas spring from there (God forbid!). I started out tonight feeling like I was doing homework again, but then I relaxed, I let the process and my enjoyment of it take over. The finished project, a watercolor and ink inspired by a photo I took in Carmel, California, isn’t perfect. The perspective isn’t perfect. I am not perfect, and I’m learning to be content with all of it.

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A Short Note

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Early post tonight. I actually did two small projects this morning, and then spent a lovely Memorial Day…cleaning the garage for six hours. I actually had planned to do something else, but quite frankly I’m exhausted.

The first project is another artist card size drawing of an apple. It was a simple drawing exercise I gave myself to do. I need to work on shading and perspective. The other is also an artist card size, but for an entirely different project. I have for years been making fairies. I’ve sold hundreds of them, usually around Christmas. I have decided to continue doing so this year, but have some ideas for making them even more artistic. I designed some wings which I plan to print on vellum. Once I have a finished fairy I’ll put up a photo.

No philosophizing about my artistic life tonight, no “woe is me”, just a very tired woman who needs to relax.

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Creating Dreams

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I wasn’t feeling great tonight, residual issues from taking the wrong medication last week. (Let that be a lesson to all of us, don’t just pop the pill out of the foil, turn it over first to see what it is!) I started to paint something architectural, but I didn’t even make it half way through the preliminary sketch, I just wasn’t up to the task. It was going to be in watercolor, and since I had the materials out I decided that watercolor would again be my medium for this evening. One of the best parts about being an artist is the ability to create your own world. We have a creative license to draw, paint, sculpt, or carve, etc., the world we want to be in. In some cases we can even have a little fun. When I was about seventeen I drew a sketch of my dad, bald. He wasn’t, and at eighty still isn’t. I thought it was funny, needless to say he didn’t. So tonight while I wasn’t feeling good I decide to paint someplace quiet, relaxing, and peaceful, someplace I’d like to be in the moment. I had glanced at a photo, but then I put it away and let my mind take over. That too seems to be coming easier these days. So tonight’s project is a place I want to be, somewhere to lay in the soft grass, look at the clouds, and relax. Now if I could only find a way to make that a reality…Image

The Art Of Simplicity

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I think I have spent years complicating my artistic process. When you focus on what you can’t do I think it tends to color what you can do. I have now spent forty days on my project. When I started I was focused on this idea of using up all of the materials I had filled my studio with over the years. I don’t think I really thought about the commitment to the work, or how it might affect me, and it has. Over the course of the last twenty years I have started far more projects than I’ve finished. Drawings, painting, even silly craft projects, where something didn’t look right, or I would make a mistake, or more likely, I would decide that whatever it was, it wasn’t good enough, and then the project was scrapped. Even now if I were to clean out the studio, and our garages, there would be a lot of half done paintings, pieces of wood, etc.. I had given up on myself and it is reflected in every unfinished project. What has happened to me in the last forty days is a transformation. I kept my promise to myself, and that’s a big accomplishment. I have produced more than fifty pieces of art in that time. Not every piece is something I love, or even like. But what is important, the biggest accomplishment is that in the process of creating those pieces I struggled with several, and didn’t stop.There were a couple that I was ready to quit, but I didn’t, I stuck it out. Some of those turned out to be some of the best work that I have created since I started this. I believe that forcing myself to confront this mental ball and chain I been dragging along has done great things for me.  My thought process is changing. The thoughts of what I can’t do are straying further and further from my mind. That is because I have forty days of “can do” looking me in the face. When you start something and you are already defeated, you have lost before you have begun. I have a quote on a magnet, I think it is Eleanor Roosevelt, but it states, “Do something everyday that scares you”. I bought it a few years ago when I was in another of the endless “new starts” that I promised myself. Sort of like all the diets that start next Monday, and  trust me I am very familiar with that one. The magnet has been sitting on my drawing table, and I have looked at it so often and thought, “It’s time”. I didn’t do it. I was afraid. Of what? Failure, maybe finding out that after all of the years of “what if?” I might discover that even if I had taken those art lessons I felt cheated out of, I still wouldn’t have been the artist I wanted to be. I am doing something every day, but guess what? I’m not afraid anymore. A little uncertain, yes. A little lost, yes. But things are getting better with every day, with every project. It’s simple. One project, one day at a time.

Two motivations behind tonight’s project. The first is that I am still trying to fulfill the object of the project. I bought a couple of mat boards at Blick last year simply because I liked that the size of the opening was different, it is long and rectangular. So when I went upstairs to see what I would do today I came across them and decided that whatever I did tonight needed to fit in that opening. The second motivation is that Dan likes pen and ink drawings. So for tonight a “simple” pen and ink.IMG_9705

The Season

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It’s Autumn

But the leaves

Have yet to fall.

The time is now,

Opportunity is in my waiting hands.

The frost of Winter

A distant expectation.

Mother Earth at her voluptuous best,

Ripened fruit,

Lush with knowledge.

Now is the time of realization,

Seeds of Spring

Long since grown,

Summers promise

At last fulfilled.

Now is the time

Before Winter’s harsh wind

The harvest of self,

To reap reward,

To be at last,

What I was meant

To be.Autumn (1)

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday’s thoughts, today’s project, watercolor and ink.

Putting Life In Perspective

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I finished my project for today in the late afternoon. I hadn’t taken the time to post either the drawing, nor the accompanying text until now. Just yesterday I had spoken to Dan about the tone of this blog. I feared it was becoming a little “woe is me”, and quite frankly I have no tolerance for whining. I told him I was planning to expand a little on my personal history, and despite my complaints here of feeling as though my artistic gifts were sorely under appreciated (because it’s true),  all of my history and the people in it, make me who I am. That was the plan, and it seems that with this blog the plans I make the day before are rarely the things that happen.

This morning the line of a poem came to my mind. I haven’t said so here before, but I also like to write, and have done so for years. New plan! I was going to take the line, which by mid-morning had become several lines, and write it all down, and then my intention was to in some way illustrate either by paint or pencil the thoughts I was having. I even had some idea of what it should look like in my head, but then I came downstairs and looked at a drawing that I began yesterday. It is of the niece of one of the dearest friends I have ever had. She is four, and in her short history, (which I will not share) she has had much loss and sadness. I put aside the brilliant epiphany of my poem and began to  finish her portrait.  As I sat here this afternoon working, the news of the tornado in Oklahoma appeared in the news feed on Dan’s phone. We turned on the television in time to see the devastated school. In the course of less than a single day the some of what I feel, the self-pity, the feeling of being inadequate, the chip on my shoulder, seem petty.  Sure, I’m entitled to my own human struggles, everyone is. No ones pain is any less than that of another, because pain, its causes, and its individual effects are just that, individual. But when I look at the face of this beautiful child, her history, her future, and the futures that so many children won’t have, I see my struggles in a different perspective. It doesn’t mean I won’t continue to look at the whys and hows of who I am. It just means that maybe I won’t be so hard on myself. That I will continue to grow as an artist, and in the process become a better, and more whole human being.

A little note about my materials. I worked in a grocery store for more years than I care to think of. It was then that I began to draw on the blank side of the bags. I love the look of chalk on brown paper.

So here is Emily, in pastel chalk and pencil.IMG_9710

Still Moving Slow

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IMG_9719Still a little under the weather, so I just did a small still life sketch with colored pencil.  I struggled a little as always with perspective, but I feel like it’s getting better.  I think maybe a need a day of just doing a lot of sketching, nothing precise, but just some free form sketching.  I’m still a little timid and uptight in my drawing. Amongst the piles of stuff in my studio are giant sketchbooks that belonged to my kids from their school days. I think I need to make it my mission this week to just grab a piece of charcoal and fill one of them. I also need to get back to the painting that I started. It has been dry to the touch for more than a week. I had planned to get back to it ASAP, but I have been allowing other projects to get in the way. If I’m going to be honest with myself I think I’ve been avoiding it.  It will be my first full figure painting, but again, time to face those fears head on! 

Tomorrow Is Another Day

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There may come a day, or hopefully days, when I am not typing this blog at ten when all I really want to do is to go to bed. Each night I swear I will put my artistic endeavors above all else the following day, and night after night I sit here knocking out a piece of art after dinner. My poor husband has fallen asleep on the couch far too many times waiting for me to finish, but there is unfortunately always something that gets in the way, and sometimes it’s not even me. There was  cleaning the house, cleaning out cat litter, cooking breakfast, making lunch, grocery shopping, three hours working on the faux brick wall project, and cooking dinner. The day just gets away from me. I’ve hashed this problem out in my head over and over. If I want to do real quality work, and anything substantial I need to start rethinking my life. I need to let some things go. So as Scarlett said, “Tomorrow is another day”, and so I will try again, try to make myself a priority, try to make my artwork a priority. Trouble is when you spend most of your life putting the needs and wants of everyone else first it becomes automatic. As I said the other day, it’s been a month since I started this project. I think I can honestly say that I may have set time aside early in the day less than a hand full of times. But I guess it’s all a work in progress, it isn’t only my work that is growing and evolving, but I think I am doing the same in other ways. I don’t stick to things, I have so many unfinished projects, but here now in my portfolio I have more than thirty pieces of finished art. I’m proud of that, and proud of myself for doing it. I feel like my personal confidence is growing with my artistic confidence, and I know that I feel happier and more content than I did a month ago. Doing things for others is very gratifying, I am a person who likes to give gifts rather than receive them, but I feel like I’m giving myself the best gift I’ve ever gotten, me, the way I was meant to be.

Tonight’s project was a simple drawing exercise. Its something I really need to work on. I know I mentioned the instant gratification person that I am. Drawing runs the gamut between pain and pleasure for me. Sometimes I absolutely love it, sometimes its algebra (a subject best left unspoken about). Painting is much more effortless for me, unless of course I torture myself with architectural type paintings. But I truly believe I can’t be the artist I want to be without working on all my skills.photo(4)

Deadlines!

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Long day yesterday. We spent the day doing our taxes which I can tell you doesn’t inspire much in the way of creativity. We didn’t finish until after six last night. I threw together a quick dinner, which for me means spaghetti carbonara, and then hoped to relax for the evening. As I ate dinner, I repeatedly told my husband that I needed to do something for this project. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I honestly feel so compelled to follow through on this that I couldn’t let it go. I looked around in my studio to see what I had at hand that would be quick. Feeling the “night before homework is due” pressure, figuring out what I could “hand in”. I didn’t want to do another watercolor, I didn’t want to do another small artist card just to get something done. I decided I was going to draw something. As an artist my biggest downfall is perspective. With never having had art lessons I don’t have many of the fundamental skills. Actually it contributes to another huge issue for me, the need for things to look like they are meant to look. As if I am a Kinkos copy machine. When I paint or draw I criticize myself horribly for it. I know, ridiculous right? I like other people’s work that isn’t “perfect”, so why do I expect that of myself? At this point I think I don’t have a chip on my shoulder but a rather large boulder. So after that long therapeutic rant, I will finish my story. I grabbed a couple of photos that were taped up in the studio, figuring I would draw one of them. I sat in my family room trying to draw but it just wasn’t coming. By this time it is after eight. I flipped through a few magazines, tried another drawing and again nothing. I told my husband that I was going to draw him. I have little to no experience in figure drawing so I thought I would at least try. The thing is when you want someone to model for you it is probably a good idea to tell them not to move. I didn’t, he did, and the drawing was finished before it got anywhere. Again I looked around for something, anything to fulfill my commitment. Behind me on a shelf was a photograph of my grandmother, Florence. I love faces, to look at, to study, and to draw. Florence became my project. I drew for roughly an hour, thought I was done, but then this morning I got up and looked at her, and decided she deserved better. Another hour or two this morning and I think she is done. I may revisit after my eyes uncross, but I’m happy with the results for now. Somehow I managed to reach both my deadlines yesterday, amazing! Art and taxes!Nana 1 (2)