From anxiety to insight and frustration to experimentation and ah-hah discoveries, this past week has been packed with irritations (I backed my car out of the garage on Friday, full moon day, whacked my driver’s side mirror hard enough to break the glass), fresh perspectives on self-trust and inner guidance (thanks to Leslie Avon Miller’s skillful coaching in the Finding Your Authentic Voice class, still in progress), erratic highs and lows (my work is exciting, my work is worm food) – not at all the typical pre-full moon week I love. Usually I’m yahooing and yee-hawing like a cowgirl riding at full gallop on strong currents of creative energy.
Not THIS full moon. Donna Watson from the wonderful blog Layers recommended checking out Eric Maisel’s class on creative anxiety. Resources for handling the creative process gracefully are a must for artists, so I signed up for it.
Pages 11: Crumpled, 48” x 48”, mixed media on stretched canvas.
Meanwhile, studio work continued with some worthwhile sample making, experimentation for new works and doing some editing on Pages 11: Crumpled, which is nearly complete.
Acknowledging that I have strong and yet objective internal voice that can help evaluate works-in-progress is a major step for me and one that has been strengthened in great part by participating in Leslie Avon Miller’s “Finding Your Authentic Voice” class, which is generating many deep insights.
The full moon seemed to spur questions about new directions in my work, whether to deconstruct language imagery more, down to the gestural shapes and forms of letters, or to give the viewer something more tangible – perhaps take writings that inspire me, like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and imbue my surfaces with those lofty, inspiring ideas, not fully legible but able to be discerned in part.
I seem to be swaying back and forth, back and forth about whether to explore language imagery as a conveyor of ideas and meaning in a visual way or to pursue it as a series of beautiful gestural marks in their own right that don’t need to convey meaning to be appreciated. Or whether the two directions can juxtapose and work together.
Maybe this is the crux of the question that has been chafing inside me and heated up by intensity of full moon energy.
Are these two directions a dialogue, one that my work wants to investigate together, a crossroads at which I need to make a choice or a new-way path, leading me into something altogether unexpected and new?
Unsettling moon, yes, but one that is propelling me towards new realizations and new growth. By the time the full moon returns, may I have made great strides in developing these ideas into new works.
Yes, about the moon thing! And I like this idea of exploring gestural marks of text without meaning. I love meaning from text but see the need to be careful. I am always wondering about integrating my own poetry into a visual piece. Somehow I shy away from it. I love text it often enters my work in as bits of sewing patterns and Asian text.
ReplyDeleteLove your exploration of what we've been doing. Yes a lot of deep I see you doing so much deep exploration and reaching out to enlarge the vision and put some of the long sought after puzzle pieces into place.