skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Strange how I slip into a slump just when all my outside markers are pointing to "should be happy". The weather's been beautiful, I have time on my hands , the garden is burgeoning, our domestic scene is more ship shape than usual with chores getting done and sit down dinners, my dad's healing fast, we are about to expand the card line and I sold a major painting! So why so glum? Mystery. I feel like I'm just not getting anything done. Well, at least what I think matters. My perfectionist aspirations tangling up the works again. Multiple worthy irons in the fire but no blaze. Again and again I have this experience of too many creative ideas but no wherewithal. Like suffocating in a windstorm. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels or caught in a vortex. No direction. When I'm like this I just try to steer my boat along the strongest current no matter how small. Just get me out of here. What holds the most juice at any given moment. Interesting to observe. Playing guitar. Writing songs. Poetry. Painting thank yous. Researching. Dancing. Just being. Turning off the mind and getting still. So that's what I've been doing. On the road to nowhere.
Detail of Illumination, acrylic painting on canvas. Now part of the Palmieri personal collection. Thanx, Phyllis!
I'm in studio sporadically and crazyily working on multiple canvases. I have been so outwardly fallow and in stew mode for so long that it is challenging to get the pump primed again. It's going slow but it is going. Here's a detail of a big piece (30 x 40) I'm working on tentatively titled Lady Chaos. Sort of appropriate considering my general state of neither here nor there. Falling in all directions. My problem has been that I am just burgeoning with so many ideas that it's hard to focus. I get impatient with the nitty gritty of the actual slow process of painting. Like I'm so antsy that I can't settle down and just do it. And when I finish a piece it doesn't seem to represent all deep steeping I've been through. I'm comforted by the idea of chaos being a state at the cutting edge of creation. Where manifest is forging out into the unmanifest is not what I would call comfortable territory. So I just have sink into it. Embrace the uneasiness.
My creative process is diverse. I now recognize all my journal writing, songwriting, poetry writing, guitar playing, dancing, nature walking, reading history and biographies and physics and philosophy and energy psychology as a big interconnected matrix that launches my creativity. It's a kind of metabolic tranformation of what I absorb into some form of expression unique to me. It feeds my creative body so I can exteriorize my interior.
I wish I had the physical energy to match all the stirring inside. Strange disconnect. I also struggle between wanting to constantly break new ground or just work with what I know and do well already. I recently realized that I have at least 3 distinct bodies of work wanting to come through. That is, three separate styles, narratives and media. At least three...sigh. Can I do it? Life dares me.
Strange how I slip into a slump just when all my outside markers are pointing to "should be happy". The weather's been beautiful, I have time on my hands , the garden is burgeoning, our domestic scene is more ship shape than usual with chores getting done and sit down dinners, my dad's healing fast, we are about to expand the card line and I sold a major painting! So why so glum? Mystery. I feel like I'm just not getting anything done. Well, at least what I think matters. My perfectionist aspirations tangling up the works again. Multiple worthy irons in the fire but no blaze. Again and again I have this experience of too many creative ideas but no wherewithal. Like suffocating in a windstorm. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels or caught in a vortex. No direction. When I'm like this I just try to steer my boat along the strongest current no matter how small. Just get me out of here. What holds the most juice at any given moment. Interesting to observe. Playing guitar. Writing songs. Poetry. Painting thank yous. Researching. Dancing. Just being. Turning off the mind and getting still. So that's what I've been doing. On the road to nowhere.
