Breaking Free
Peach Tree
Last week I wrote about giving things over to God. This includes events I really have no control over, as well as daily encounters. Recently I added my creative practice and the making of art to that list. My motivation for this was the feeling of being stuck. Some might call it an artist block, for me it felt bigger than a block, it was more a sense of being trapped within my artist’s self. It was a confinement I put upon myself without really knowing I was doing it.
Looking back, I think it started when I graduated from MassArt with my MFA. When I was in graduate school, I was pushed to experiment and explore, taking risks and being okay with making really ‘bad’ art. When I graduated and returned to my professional life as an academic trying gain full time employment as a professor, is when the creative chains started to emerge. Hoop after hoop started to be placed before me. It was implied my work had to be edgy, more conceptual, had to be this, or that etc… if I wanted to gain a full-time professorship. I found myself creating work that I thought would meet the criteria that was implied I should be doing; this then impact what I was creating and the authenticity of it.
Some of the work I created during this time I did like and looking back it did have merit and as an artist it did feel like it had authenticity… at least in the beginning. But as time passed it started to feel less so, instead it felt forced and as that continued the chains continued to grow, weighing down my creative spirit. My work started to get tighter, and I felt the energy draining from it and me… I was having to force myself to go to the studio, creating was starting to feel like a chore, not something I looked forward to but something I had to do because I was an academic in the arts and supposed to be an artist. Over time, it became clear that no matter how many hoops I jumped through I was not going to achieve full time academic professorship. Not at the college I was working at and had been for 20 years. This revelation was one of the motivations to start my own business. I was tired of working for someone else and getting nowhere, and feeling like I was never good enough, both as a teacher and an artist.
Getting Palisade Posh off the ground, did and does take up a lot of my time, but making art is a part of this vision. One of the key objectives for the Airbnb and Palisade Posh was that I would have more time to make art and work in the garden. The garden and nature were to be my new subjects. Nature has always rejuvenated me, so it only made sense to make it the subject of my art! At some point, the garden took on a new direction as a ‘Market Garden’. This then became all-consuming of time and the push to have it make money started sucking all the joy out of gardening and growing things. Then Andy had his stroke, and everything ground to a halt. There was no time to make art, and it was all I could do to keep my head above water.
Slowly though, Andy began to recover; and the purpose of the ‘Market Garden’ shifted back to being just a garden; which took a lot of pressure off me. I started to make room for my art; however, this is also when I realized just how ‘stuck’ I was artistically. So what to do?
It was a line in a book I was reading that gave me the idea! The main character was also stuck, trapped in a cage she had created herself and her leading man told her to “… get out of her way…!” It was a simple line but a brilliant one that resonated with me completely! If I was to move forward with my art in a way that felt authentic to me, I needed to get out of my way! And so, I started to create, it didn’t matter what it was just as long as I was creating something.
This too reminded me of a video clip I say on social media of Sir Ian McKellen speaking about the creative practice and giving oneself permission to make art even bad art. I knew this… I even teach this philosophy to my students but somehow over time, I apparently forgot how to do it myself!
To get myself back into the studio, I just started creating stuff, anything… I began with the continuous line drawings, then decided to add watercolor. I experimented with different approaches first drawing then adding color, then doing the reverse to see which gave the better results. I started drawing things I usually avoided, like architecture and animals. I looked at artists’ work I thought had both energy and originality and thought about what it was that made it so and realized part of my problem was I over thinking things. “Don’t think just do” became my mantra.
If I didn’t have time to draw or paint, I started making mala bracelets. I reflected on the work I created when I was in graduate school and what made it different from the work I created after I graduated. This is when I found my muse… it was self-portrait I created during one of my residencies. It was free and loose but the brushstrokes and mark making were confident and decisive! Even though it wasn’t abstract per say, it reminded me of an exhibition I saw years ago in Denver on women Abstract Expressionists. I had bought the catalog from the show. Look at these women and their work is what finally did it for me, I could feel the chains loosing, I knew what I needed to do!
The next morning, I took my coffee and headed to the studio. I had decided on my palette the night before and squeezed out large amounts of paint. I had a canvas that I had started weeks ago. It was from the “out of chaos comes order” concept… today I was going to embrace the chaos and just paint, I didn’t care if my brush strokes looked like leaves, or branches, or peaches… it was about the energy and decisiveness of the stroke. It was about the texture of the paint, the values and variety of the strokes. What I created that morning was not abstract expressionism, it was ‘abstract impressionism’ which for me was the combination of expression, impression and abstraction all coming from the energy of the brushstroke! I had finally broken free and let the simple act of painting take over. It was glorious… I got out of my way and just painted. I didn’t worry whether it looked like a peach tree, I just focused on putting down color. I added, subtracted and painted… I was finally free of myself!
Now the question is, can I do it again? And again… and again? Only time will tell, but for now I’m just going to keep creating, experimenting and making stuff and see where it takes me. The joy of creating has finally returned and with that my authenticity!
