I paint every day and I pop a blog up every day, and that is the touchstone, the thing that is consistent in my world. The world is fucked up. The last time I really felt hope was ten years ago. The weight of my thoughts is heavy a lot of the time.
Some of this is definitely transient, and part of the journey of perimenopause, which won’t be concluding a year from now, not this month anyway.
I am at a stage in my creativity where I am asking myself Why Am I Doing This? Not as an opening for my inner critic to run wild, nor as an invitation for outside interference and advice. My fuck how do I hate advice. I probably have mild PTSD around advice, because of the way certain folk have used it to control me in the past. I mean unsolicited advice, advice that hasn’t been asked for, advice that is imposed. If I ask for advice, it’s different.
But I roll the question of why am I doing this around in my grey matter and listen to the answers, and make notes. What kind of art do I want to make? Is another good question. I have a lot of knowledge, and I have skills, and a practise, even if that practise is sometimes small and doesn’t feel like growth. But what do I want to do with it all?
These are rhetorical questions, I am naval gazing in public.
I have done a lot of realism in portraits this year, and I have really enjoyed it, but I am not sure if that’s really feeding me now. I want to play, and abstract, and experiment more, and make terrible pages I can tear up and use as collage.
So that’s what I did today. The paper already had paint on it, using up paint from a painting last week, and I played with rollers and then pulled out shapes, and used up some of a tube of paint that I don’t really like, and I don’t think it’s good, or anything like that, but it’s the way I played today, and that’s fine.
I just paused writing this to go and do something, and when I came back there was a post in my feeds about process not product, and it was such a timely reminder that every day of art doesn’t have to produce something I like.

That pyrrole red, tho, I like that.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
216/300
Leave a comment