I was farting around on Tumblr one day a couple weeks ago and I came across a painting that nearly knocked me out of my chair. This painting, a HUGE portrait of a girl's face, completely took my breath away.
(To view, go here: http://www.elly.ca/)
I nosed around her website for a while and not long into said nosing did I start to feel bad about myself.
I know, I KNOW. It is so stupid to compare your art to someone else's. You can never make someone else's art. There mere idea is fundamentally impossible. However, I still could not keep my insecurities from bubbling up to the surface. They don't very often, with art, but that day they bubbled quite violently.
I think part of it is this artist's work embodies something I would love to be able to achieve in my own work: painting emotionally and loosely, with careful and beautiful use of color.
I moped for a while and then started thinking.
What do I feel my work has been missing lately?
Where do I feel I'm not exploring enough?
What kind of feelings am I trying to communicate?
How do I communicate those feelings?
To answer my own ponderings, I feel my work has been lacking an energy, a vitality, a movement that it once had years ago. The gesture and brushy quality that launched my interest in texture and light. I've swayed the other direction into a more careful and illustrative approach -- I don't believe "too far" the other direction is the proper way to describe this, as all explorations into an idea serve a specific, useful, and grand function in the overall body of work and pursuit of ideas -- but this stirring of insecurities I now see clearly as marking a shift moving back the other direction: painting more expressively, accessing emotions more, responding and reacting openly to the material and the surface, placing less judgment on a mark or expression, being able to laugh at myself and keep trucking on in a very "air" kind of way.
I really do need to credit Jamie with helping me realize these things. We were chatting online and she slapped me with this:
[Regarding stumbling upon other good artists]
I hate that so much. But we are who we are. We can't change it.
But we can take bits of other people and make it our own
[and what to do about it]
Girl, your talent is better than tht. You DO have it in you. You gotta work it out!
Keep pushing. Play with color. Spend a day mixing color even! Make a color wheel in your sketch book. Definitely find a figure group. This girl has great gesture an emotion and is good with color.
You can be that too! But better cuz youre you. And f her website. It's better than mine lol
I cannot describe how much I love this girl. She always knows exactly, precisely, what to say.
But her mention of figure drawing lit me up inside. THAT'S the thing that's missing. THAT is the key to communicating the energy and gesture in my paintings -- getting my brain moving, thinking, buzzing with form and movement. FIGURE DRAWING. Drawing from a live model, in a room with other people drawing, something in which I am so expert yet haven't pursued for... five YEARS? Jesus Christ. That is five years I've not done what my soul is telling me to do.
Hipbone Studio has three sessions a week for $10 per session. Two of them I plan to attend on a weekly basis (the third is during the workday). I went to my first session last Wednesday and it appears I've still got it in me...
Pics of my most recent painting to follow!
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