fearless Creating: Eat with two Hands

The "hunger to create" is what drives creativity.  Anxiety over creating, if not addressed, can supresses that hunger, killing it.  Maisel offers several ways to "feed" a hungry mind, a kind of whetting the creative appetite. 

Eat With Two Hands

Do you mean to learn daintily what red can do?  No!  Spread red around with two hands, live with it night and day, paint your ceiling red, paint your body red, see red everywhere, learn its every association, its very meaning.  Dream red.  Be red.  Feed your hungry mind a lava flow of red, a torrential sunset of red, a bloodbath of red.  Learn deeply.

Rococo Red

8 x 10

watercolor on hot press illustration board

I adore red.  I am excited and intimidated by red.  We grow a tulip called Rococo, the perfect subject for my immersion in red.

fearless Creating: going wild

If you consider pages, I have not made much progress in the book.  But if you could peek into my head you would be amazed! Like a teenager's closet, I am bursting with surprises.  I am living in that wonderful place that is rich and full and exciting. 

Maisel, the author, describes a painter he was working with and it was like reading about myself.

Usually he would bring a preformed image to the painting moment.  The activity of painting was rather more the reproducing of that ready-made image than the encountering of a blank canvas.  On a regular basis the finished product looked like what he'd had in mind and possessed technical merit, but struck him as conventional and dead.

OMG--when I am totally honest with myself, this describes much of my work for the past few years!  Ahhh, no wonder I was not excited or enthusiastic about painting.  

Somewhere along the line he'd turned correctness into a synonym for good-ness and defined good painting as painting like an Old Master.

Somewhere along the line I'd defined good painting as painting like all the painters celebrated in all the big shows--AWS, NWS, etc.  Not that I don't admire the work these people produce, much of it takes my breath away.  BUT why did I decide that I wanted to paint like anyone else?  AND how do I now break away from that?

Maisel suggests that in addition to hushing and holding, the artist must learn to be wild.  He describes wildness as an "amalgam of passion, vitality, rebelliousness, nonconformity, freedom from inhibitions.  Think of this wildness as working naked."  And then he suggests working naked!  Seriously!

Now, this guy has really gotten into my head, and I am totally digging the doors he is opening to me so I am seriously considering this "activity" but here's the thing.  My studio looks out onto open fields, foot hills and mountains, but it is also within sight range of a major interstate.  That's one, two, it's winter in Idaho--that means sub-zero temperatures and three, I am just not a naked-in-the-house-kind-of-girl.  (Totally different on hot summer days anywhere near a body of water.)  I think it would just prohibit me, I would be totally conscious of myself and not my work--so until further notice I will not literally paint naked.

Rather than strip myself--I stripped my work!  The very next exercise was to draw my Wild Faces and give them a name.  While hushing an image came to me, a face obscured but emerging from some wild Eden.  Working very intuitively and allowing total freedom--I found Her! 

Emerging

multi-media

8"x10"

fearless Creating: Day Three

"Pears"

8"x10"

$50

 I have been very conscientious about "hushing", enough that my poor husband was a bit unnerved and asked if he had done anything wrong--as in why was I giving him the silent treatment.  I explained that I was "hushing"--I was thinking and non-thinking and painting in my head.  (He is a writer, so he understood immediately.  I just forgot to tell him I would be dropping out now and again.)

Now for the second part of "hushing" which is "holding".  Holding is described as "following your idea".

"...once you nurture your wish to create, once you hush and go into these periodic trances in which ideas gestate, you will begin to possess emergent ideas which, in order to grow in vivacity, must themselves be nurtured.  

You hold precious both the feeling of working and these nascent ideas.

Work is happening underneath, in this place of inner quiet (which is also a wild place), but work is not happening independently of you.  You are holding it:  giving it space, giving it a container, offering it life."

I am nurturing the idea of beautiful marks.  Each brushstroke is meaningful, in and of itself.  Each brushstroke must be a beautiful mark, not just a technical tool to create a wash or layer values.  Every time my brush touches the page, I try to leave a mark that if made on a fresh sheet of paper would be pleasing to look at.  It's a tall order and I can see where this "idea" could easily overwhelm and over-complicate a painting.  It feels like conducting a symphony--each note must be beautifully played and layer together to create a harmonious whole.  I know there will be a lot of missteps and discarded paper but when it works,  I love it!

"Apples"

8"x10"

$50

"Filling a space in a beautiful way.  That is what art means to me."

Georgia O'Keeffe

Connections

The Idaho Watercolor Society southeast region is opening a new show tonight at the Pocatello Art Center.  We were asked to show work that was "new" in some way and to explain that "newness".

"Connections"

by

JaSabin, IWS

I am showing "Connections".  My intention was to explore realistic objects in an abstract way, focusing on the dark values of the composition.  I connected all the dark values to create an interesting abstract shape--one dark value "flowing" into the adjacent one.

To test this lets play "Connect the Darks":  Squint your eyes, to obscure the objects and narrow the light, and see if the dark values do blend together and flow.