kicking and screaming

i am one of the kinds of artists you may not hear about often.  you hear of the artists who paint their fears, their hearts are on their sleeves.  they paint thru the most horrible points of their lives.  they paint while in body casts, they learn to paint with their feet when they can't use their hands, and then their teeth when they can no longer paint with their feet.  they will find a way to paint when the earth is crumbling away beneath them.  they will find a way to paint!

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i am not one of those artists. 

this is hard work for me.

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when i am depressed i do nothing.  not one thing.  i am sludge.  a breathing mass of darkness.  breathing.  i am breathing.  thats what i do.  thank god for these things we do instinctively.



it's very frustrating to me to be one of these kinds of artists instead of the other kind.


today i told myself i MUST go to the studio and paint.

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"just do a little bit.  it'll be good for you", i said  to me.

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and i went to the studio, and i worked on two canvasses.  i worked for an hour on them.  an hour total.  and that was plenty for now.  i'm working on these baby steps right now.  just little moments of getting out of my head and onto the canvas.

yes, i moved, the image is blurry.  

not gonna fix it, sorry

i've sat with her in my living room, playing with her in my head for about a month, and today got to the actual act of physically touching the canvas.

i changed the color to her hair beads so they didn't disappear, i changed her lips a little, color and shape.  gave her more definition to her face with shadows and highlights, added and then scrubbed off some feathers.  played with the lights and darks in her neck, added an overall terra cotta glaze to the whole canvas then lightened up her headband.  she is now back in the living room and i will continue to listen to her.

here she was before

this one...  this was a canvas i had given up on for a while.

it had a little life to it before.  it had a sad lotus and blues and greens splattered with my india inks.  it was a little lost, but it is a totally different canvas now!

as i was creating a background on a white canvas, i decided to print the inks i had used onto this sad canvas.  i was using oranges, purples and reds, and i put both canvasses face to face, so the ink would smear onto this one.  the effect was magic!  some ink had gone into the lotus and i was happy with that.  i wanted to fix the flower anyway, so painted it out again, letting the ink spread into the cream colored paint without mixing too much.  i then re-painted the stem, added a highlight, and played with the background a little more.

after i took a photo i felt the lotus wasn't happy until it knew where it was, so i made sure to add some  depth, water lines and ripples, so it knew it was above the water.  pretty pleased with how it's turned out so far.  not bad for an old unloved canvas.  

so, if you find me down the road, and i am doing well with my art- selling, doing art fairs, whatever- know it has not come easy.  it has come with lots of breaks where i couldn't get off the couch.  it came with tears and frustration with myself.  it came with inner tantrums.  it came with incredible anxiety.  it came after i wasn't sure i would be able to get up in the morning or if i wanted to.  

until later,

jenny