So this past Spring I completed my last (!!!) grad school class. The goal of the class was to help us (art teachers) create a sustainable practices for making art. This is a goal I have never given up on, but all of my most productive art making moments have been in conjunction with a class.This class required me to take stock of my artistic practice and my needs as an artist and find ways to help me persevere when I do not have an external force driving my work.
One of the most valuable resources in the class was the book Art & Fear. I had walked past it many times in the book store, thinking “What does art have to do with fear?” However reading it has made me realize that I am not alone in my struggles to create a sustainable art making practice. It points out that many stop doing art when there is no goal or destination to work toward (a class, a gallery show, your CRITIQUE day!) I relate so much to this. One very practical piece of advice the book gives to sustain your art making is to 1. Make friends with others who create art and share your in-progress art with them often, and 2. Make this- the sharing with your artist friends- the destination of your work instead of the gallery show, the class critique, etc. I really loved this idea and I already have friends who create! At the same time I was afraid and nervous… what if I sent an email to my maker friends and then NEVER followed up… this would be just another failure in my attempts to keep making work. But then I remembered I was reading a book called Art & FEAR for a reason. So I started an email thread including all my in-progress work and thoughts. It worked great! I got super helpful feedback, and I learned the value of simple things like photographing my in progress work and sketches. Of course as the end of the semester approached I dropped my weekly post to concentrate on my work. Then once the semester was over I still didn’t pick up the pieces because I was focused on finishing the school year. (Also I am pregnant- due August 13th- so the end of the school year was a bit more stressful than usual.) But after three weeks of enjoying the summer and decompressing I am ready to jump back in! The next couple blog posts will update on my grad school work, followed hopefully by some new summer work!
Right now my basic theme is: creating windows into worlds that I could imagine existing in my favorite children’s novels- Is this one of the planets from Madeleine L’Engle Series, or one the lands in OZ or Narnia? A lot of my ideas are stemming from old ideas- my beautiful dreams I used have and draw, art work that failed but I kept anyways..
The sketch I made today is based on a family portrait I did- My question was how could I turn this into a magical world that must be traveled through.
The trees are hammered metal supporting a sea which is made of books. Someone (who I’m not sure) is traveling across in a sky lantern that is too bright. I am also wondering who lives in the woods. The black divided sky is a visual found in the original family portrait but perhaps indicates a totally different way a of the dawn and night fall which is not gradual but dramatic and sudden.
So then I tested out the color scheme. Ugh… I hated it. I didn’t think it worked at all in color. At least in these colors.
This ugly watercolor took some of the wind from my sail.
What should be the color of the pages? Natural paper color, maybe edged with the tree colors where the pages break? Blue like my original painting? Something else?
In the end I combined the blue with the colors coming from the trees. I tested out some options for the ground and ended up having a layer of Payne’s Grey bricks slowly transition to a green mossy cover. It makes me wonder about this place. Is life slowly dying here? Or maybe it is on the edge of a desolate urban environment. No true focal point in this image- it is really just a setting.