Today's painting was frustrating. By Day 19 I should have an idea of what I'm doing and be able to consistently turn out great work, right? - a good reminder not to let expectations like that run the show. Today's experiment, however, just couldn't seem to find balance...
I woke up extra dizzy (I'm actually dizzy on a daily basis, constantly) and just "out of whack" in a few ways, but just fine in others...things throughout the day have slowly followed suit, however, "losing balance"...to the point where my painting set up flipped over, sending my water flying, along with my painting-which took about 5 minutes to locate and too much time to clean up the mess. I had to jump between video recording devices again for a variety of reasons, both devices fell too many times to count - this should be a fun one to edit. :P And throughout the painting, I just couldn't get the elements to balance for some reason - no matter how hard I tried. The paper started losing its strength and was getting ridiculously bent up. I had to stop simply because I was sure I'd end up with a piece of garbage pretty soon! Seriously, this was not a pretty process today. A reminder to learn how to just let go instead of forcing, perhaps?
While I'm not thrilled with it, it actually is a pretty fitting depiction of how I feel today, inside and out...unbalanced and messy. I don't want to share it, and I don't want to feel this way either. But, here it is.
I have loved the fact that art has been a wonderful outlet to take the painful, unpleasant stuff of life, and turn it into beauty...but the result isn't always beautiful. Art is not straight forward, there is not a right or wrong answer, and often times you have more failures than successes... those are the parts people don't see - the loads of art that were started and never finished, the massive amounts that were thrown away or painted over. So what you usually end up seeing is the very small percentage of art that the artist actually felt worked... the stuff that did turn out beautiful, and inspiring, that people want to buy or wish they were capable of creating. (I'm typing as I'm thinking through this by the way) I love having art in my life, but it isn't always easy, or fun, or pretty. As mentioned, a lot of times it stems from the unpleasant.
My rule for myself in this project was to do ONE painting a day, and no matter how it turned out, I had to throw it out into the world. Of course I secretly hoped every single one would be amazing, but realistically, I knew there was a good chance that wouldn't be the case... in fact, considering how new this medium is to me and how uncomfortable I am, there was an even bigger chance of most paintings being "failures"... and for some reason I still thought this project was a good idea. ;)
In a sense, this set up forces me to show my flaws and failures. I really didn't think this through. ;) But I guess it is more honest.
Anyway...despite the failures and the ugly parts, there is always something to learn.
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