Pushing Your Personal Envelop
I recently pushed my artistic envelope so hard I broke it. “Why? How?” you ask… well let me tell you.
As some of you are aware I recently started an Instagram account, and I love it. Instagram is the artist’s Social Media: it is so visual and visceral, and you get to choose what you see on your feed. It is focused on beauty and real moments from people’s life. Your feed is filled with the people you have chosen to follow, so all the things that bother you about your other social media aren’t there. Your crazy aunt’s politics? Gone. The stupid videos your friend from high school constantly shares? Nope. Just images that have inspired or encouraged people.
But I digress. With my Instagram I was carful who I followed. I chose people whose images consistently spoke to me, and while this has included a lot of landscape photography and paintings, jewelry makers, portrait artists, and some friends and family I was surprised to find that I was also following some abstract artists. This is funny as abstract art was the bane of my existence in high school and condescendingly tolerated in college. So, the fact that the images I most looked forward to seeing on my Instagram feed were the works of the abstract artists got me thinking.
In the past I have liked and admired other artist’s work without it having any real effect on what I do in my own artistic practice. Life went on as usual: I was on one of my painting binges - painting every chance I got - working on my cowboys.
When I finished a painting, I was passionate about it left me with the dilemma whether to work on two unfinished (and uninspiring) paintings from last year, or to start a new painting. But of what?
Suffering from this lack of inspiration, I pulled out last year’s paintings and looked at them a while, but couldn’t get those cobwebby inspirational juices flowing again. So, I set them aside and pulled out the new painting board I’d bought to try.
The blank surface stared at me as I dug through my inspiration box/folder/computer file searching for something I wanted to paint – something that I wouldn’t mind if the new surface messed up.
All this time I was conscious of the paint drying on my pallet and finally I decided that I needed to push the envelope, to get the creative juices flowing, have some fun, do something I’d never do, and stop the self-loathing before it took hold. So, I decided to just paint like one of the abstract artists I’ve been admiring on Instagram. I reminded myself that if I didn’t like it I could always paint over it. I started painting with my reds, yellows, and oranges.
With my biggest brush I took broad, free strokes, reminding myself to be free and loose and just paint till I was done. It had been a long time since I had felt such joy and freedom while painting. It occurred to me that I am often confined and restricted by the image I want to portray or the thought I want to express. In that case after the initial session with a painting it stops being fun and becomes work. But this… nothing was riding on this, I was just having fun. The juices were flowing.
Drawing some on the patterns I’ve been working with in my ceramics recently I could suddenly see this experiment as a work of art.
One that not only fit in my greater body of work but in a way culminated it, beautifully uniting of my paintings and my ceramics - tying them together as I’d never been able to connect them before.
I was free! Free from the confines of my own fears, free to just have fun with my art. Once finished I lived with this piece as I do, to see if the exuberance and liking could survive the passage of time and they have not only done that, but it has given me ideas and inspirations on how to fix those old, tired, unfinished paintings that sit in my studio condemning me for abandoning them.
So, ladies and gents, when I next take up the brush who knows what will be the outcome. Even I don’t know! I do know I want to have fun and freedom in my work again. You may well see a lot more of my envelop breaking abstractions, or maybe even some combination of the natural world I have loved to paint my whole life and this new and exciting adventure. I am a post, post, modern artist, I can do what I like ;D
