Parenting

You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Create

My brain is open. It is open to all sorts of information and ideas, but it is far more evident that it is open; as in it is open spilling out of my ears and pooling on the floor. There is just too much to keep track of all of the time. I am combating it like a champ though. I am drawing and taking it slow. I am keeping up, but keeping myself at a good pace. I’ve been making my coffee with a pour over. I made myself lunch. I did the laundry and picked up the house. I have been more efficient with my lessons and grading, more prolific in my tiny doodles, and much more apt to have my nose in a book. I have been working on watercolor studies and final pieces and every morning I create a watercolor bug.

My phone is the devil. I need to put it down. It is just oh so easy to pick it up and check Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and repeat though. Chasing a toddler around makes your brain feel like soup. The release of the phone feels like a nice crusty bread to mop up the last of the broth.

It makes sense. It is a fight to be able to create.

In order to help myself both calm down and keep up the momentum of creating I’ve started to catalog all of the quiet moments I have with my son. I’ve drawn just about everything that he has brought me or given me as a present, and also some of the moments that we share. It has been a major help in attempting to be slow. The world operates very quickly. It is a fight to be slow and meticulous just as it is a fight to be creative.

I am not always winning this fight (see thoughts on smartphone above.) but I am feeling better about the it. I am slowly trying to implement changes in my life to return myself to the creative entity that I once felt myself to be. I am also realizing that for all of the time that I spent telling myself that I was working, I think I produce almost as much work now. It is quite possible that it has more to do with the type of time you spend rather than the amount of time. I’ve had several ex’s try to express that to me before.

I’ve been fascinate about this idea of time, however. There are periods of time where all I do is produce artwork and other times where in the past I have spent with my girlfriends or wife. It does seem like this is one of the better instances of balance that I have ever mustered. I feel as though I am making but not impeding progress. Now all I need to do is line up a couple more shows for 2017. Although, that might just break my balance that I’ve been trying to cultivate.

Peace

Mike

Clouds and Paint

Last week I went to visit several very good friends. Each stop revealed multiple works that I had painted. My style has been very different than most of that work in the last two years. While there is something really great about my newer drawing based work, I have been missing the layers evident in my more painterly style. I really had started drawing more as a way to work on my skills where I felt they were wavering. It was not that long ago that I wouldn’t worry about the state of drawing so much because I knew that once I started painting I could make the work look like whatever I needed it to look like. I had kind of lost sight of the fact that the strictly drawing based work was an exercise. It is time to paint again. I want some more serious shows again.

With these last two thoughts in mind, I started at one of my sketchbooks during the middle of a class that I was monitoring on Saturday. I visited some cloud motifs that I had worked with a couple years ago. They were really a modification of the clouds in the old Cloud Constructor works, but with more of the express intent of making the clouds characters in their own right. I started crossing this imagery with the rain marks. Rain has always signified a sort of cleansing and rebirth to me. Perhaps it is like a continued sort of baptism? The rebirth brought me back to me child who is on the way. I started mixing the baby badger into the piece as well.

Finally I was able to get some real painting in the other night. My wife was asleep on the couch and I was listening to Ben Kweller ( I love pop music when I am working through new ideas. ) I took a panel that I had nailed together in attempts to entertain her little brother at one point. Side note: that plan did not work. I liked the shape of the pieced together wood and I thought that cloud forms would add a nice contrast to the rectilinear shapes making up the larger shape of the surface.

Slowly everything started to form in my head. The clouds and the rain are a way of thinking of media and ideologies which saturate our vision and thoughts. It is all one confusing cloud or blob. I began to think about my child. What are all of these extraneous bits of information going to feel like to a small child learning the ways of the world?

The larger piece felt pretty good and I felt like the colors were working really well. It felt like the right thing to be painting again. I started to wonder if there might be something in working the painterly and the drawing back and forth a little bit more.

This is what I ended up with when I started to think about the two as one. I think that there is probably some success in here that I had not been aware of before. We will have to see.

Peace
-Mike