What I have noticed though is that this, unfortunately, spills over from my life and into my art. The first time I realized that I was getting too picky about my painting was in college. I had worked on a portrait for an entire semester and when the class was over, the painting was not finished. No big deal. I just set up in one of the studios and continued working while another class began. MONTHS later, a friend walked up as I was cleaning up for the day and said, "You know it doesn't really look any different now than when you started." I looked at him as if he were nuts and proceeded to point out all of the things I had accomplished in the past few months. He conceded on a few points but again pointed out that for at least the past month, the painting really hadn't changed all that much then he turned and walked away.
I brushed this encounter aside and went to my next class, but it started to eat at me - invading my peace and my concentration at the most inopportune times - and later that day I ran back to the studio when I could spare a few minutes and stared at the painting in earnest. The next morning I pulled out my paints and placed my signature in the bottom right. It was finished.
The truth is that I could have probably continued painting for another month or so, drawing myself deeper into the details, blissfully ignorant of that fact that I was not only wasting time, I was also risking overworking the painting and ruining it.
Lily
Years later, when I again decided to enter the art world I dragged myself back to the beginning - back to MY beginning - and starting working seriously on something that had been a joyful pastime in my youth. My earliest memory of creating art was sitting in the church
pew beside my mother as a child drawing.
I would
intently study the picture on the front of the bulletin, taking my time to block in shapes and shades
and outlines with my borrowed ball-point pen. This time around though, it was my own images that I would used and good quality artist's pens, not whatever my mother happened to find floating around in the bottom of her purse. So I took my camera out and I took about a million shots and I whittled it down to about two or three good ones and got them printed out on card stock so that I could see if I was still any good at this without ruining something I'd just spent a lot of money on.
So I started working, outlining shapes, finding shades and shadows, interpreting outlines and when I was done I was so pleased with the finished product that I began another interpretation of the same image - and then I got carried away - I did too much - and I ruined the second piece. It wasn't that I was putting in things that I didn't really see. I just wasn't taking the time to recognize that some things need to be seen but don't need to be acknowledged when it comes to art. Sometimes it is the things we leave OUT that makes a piece good art.
Morning Rose
"So what does this all have to do with painting knives?" you ask.
I felt like I needed to paint again. I loved the photography and I loved studying the photos in depth as I went back over them with the pen and ink. I loved the connection it gave me to my childhood and the times of intense concentration it demanded from me. But still - I needed to paint again. This duality had risen up in me and consequently in my work as well. I am intensely focused on all of the details of a photograph when I work with them and I just couldn't stand the thought of being dragged into a painting in the same way. (After all, history had showed me that I was capable of doing just that.) Solution: only allow myself painting knives - no brushes - to force myself to step away from the details and look at the big picture. The looseness I feel when I work on one of my paintings now is like the satisfaction of untying a hard-to-get-undone knot. It's like I have given myself permission to be okay with my work - to LIKE my work - to be proud of my accomplishments every time I finish a painting.
The Singular and The Sovereign
