Feeling a fraud

Feeling a fraud

Who am I trying to kid? Why do I think I can paint? There are so many people out there on YouTube that are obviously better than I am, so why do I bother? Maybe I should just retire, hang it up and watch TV or clean the house? 

That was the way I felt yesterday after a totally frustrating unproductive day in the studio. You may be surprised to hear me talk like this, but I thought you might like to know that I too feel this way sometimes. We don’t usually post these sort of things in our blogs and social media posts. We want to show how awesome our attempts our, why our work is worth looking at.

Ok, don’t start to worry about me. I went to bed, pushed the failed painting out of my head and got a good nights sleep. When I woke I, I just shook my head and said, “Silly girl, get back to work! So you had a bad day, so what, just get back in the studio and work through it!” 

But damn, sometimes I just want it to be easier. I feel like after all the years I have devoted to the craft, it should just roll off the paint brush perfectly, and sometimes it does. But in truth, I have grown the most from the challenging paintings. The ones that push me and refuse to let me become complacent. The ideas that force me to break out of my patterns and take risks.

I know that something new is trying to materialize and if I keep on doubting the process it will remain elusive. Sure I can just give up, retreat to something more familiar, or I can take a minute to regroup here and get back to work.

Early on in the struggle, before it took a nosedive, but I reserve the right to push a painting to the point of ruination! 

Taking Risks

   

Last week I was totally inspired by the start I had on this painting.  I was so connected, in the moment, and the marks seemed to just channel through me. Fortunately, I took some photos along the way, so I have a memory and record of it to share here, for now it has been lost through my attempts to complete it. But, I am not going to beat myself up over it. It had some legitimate compositional errors (the above is a cropped detail, the original is 30x36) that needed to be addressed and I wasn’t going to let those remain even if others were willing to overlook them. I also didn't want to just crop the piece down to the composition that worked. As artists, if we aren’t willing to take risks in our work, we will never move beyond what we already know. We will continue to create work that is familiar and comfortable to us.  I took a risk, it didn’t pan out.  But I reserve the right to take that risk and not stop working when it reaches someone else’s idea of finished.  This isn’t an original thought. I went to a talk given by Amy Silman at the ICA in Boston (http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/AmySillman/).  She remarked that she hated the question “When do you know a piece is finished”. She vehemently stated, “When I say it is!”  She said that she retains the right to totally destroy a piece in the process.  I concur. There were many discoveries I made while working on this piece that I will carry into future pieces, and I haven’t given up hope that this painting will become something respectable eventually.  I rarely abandon a painting, it may take years but sooner or later I will have recovered from the memory of what it once was, and I will discover what it can be now. Stayed tuned for the future incarnation!