After a month�s hiatus, this week, finally, I�ve been back in my studio. That�s a long time to be away. When I first came home from my travels I wondered if I would ever want to paint again. I was busy rearranging my house, making my nest comfortable. I didn�t feel the necessity to paint. That was a strange feeling. If I define myself as an artist, I should feel the desire to paint every day, no? But actually, I am just someone who loves to paint. A label, even one as romantic as saying I am an artist, can be limiting. Painting is my profession and I am much more than what I �do.� I am what I feel and think and how I react to life. Of course this is all colored by my seeing the world in such a way that makes me then want to paint.
When I first started meditating daily, about twenty-five years ago, I found I couldn�t paint. My mind was blank; the desire was gone. This was unsettling, confusing, not to be able to work. At that point I felt I had to revise how I thought about myself, how I lived with me. After several months (actually nine long months), when I finally was able to work again, the flow of creativity was so much more even, so natural, not forced, not a label, just what it was, the joy of working. I was able to get out of my own way.
Last week, when time opened up, it seemed like the most natural thing to do, paint. And as usual after being away from it, the first day is so exhilarating, almost like the first day ever, almost like falling in love with it all over again.
An interesting thing happens with a break from the routine of working. Somehow it is like my mind learned so much when I wasn�t working. It felt, somehow, that the paintings that I had left unfinished, in various stages of �not working� or �not successful,� were able to talk to me and tell me exactly what to do. The process felt so precise.
One quality I work towards is where I can feel that this painting, this particular one, has to be the way it is. Nothing in it can be any different than what it is. Then it is finished. Sometimes this does happen easily but usually it does not. No matter how I get there, that feeling of the piece being right is indescribable. Visual communication from the painting to me, from me to you.
Posted by leya at January 9, 2005 07:10 AMVERY interesting about the creative process. I think I have experienced something similar, but not in artistic areas.
BTW, Jette said you and your daughter were the only other mother/daughter "team" this year in Holidailies. (My daughter is Red Diana--except I can't really keep track of her S/N. She wrote about the fatal wreck on Xmas Eve.)
Hello, Sue. When I came across your blog on Holidailies, I was really delighted to find someone my age, with grown children and grandchildren. I didn't realize Diana was your daughter. Families who blog together, etc............
Posted by: Leya at January 10, 2005 06:39 PM