News — Process

Sept 1 marks my second 30x30 challenge. Instead of faces, I’m focusing on building my collaged owl series. However, just because the challenge is a few weeks away, doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. Is working ahead cheating? To me that’s not the question I ask. The question I ask myself is “How do I finish an owl a day?” To finish an owl a day means doing the prep work. These owls don’t take a day to make. The owls themselves really are the last of many many step beginning with countless hours of making hand painted papers, drawing in notebooks and preparing collaged backgrounds.

For my September Thirty in Thirty, I’m going to focus on collage owls. For those of you who have been reading this blog the past year, this is a bit of a departure for me. The reason I’m coming back to owls is while I’ve been doing owls off and on for years, I’ve never focused solely on them enough to create a body of work.

Drawing class has become the heartbeat of my art practice. It's a safe place where it doesn't matter what emerges from my paper. Showing up is the only important thing. And then some days I'll walk in tired and be surprised by a breakthrough. It's where I not only practice making art but work on the mindset I want for making art. I'm learning process over product. I'm learning how to have art making be a part of my life for decades to come.

Vacation has a magical quality. I don’t necessarily mean the coming home relaxed mostly although that is nice. It’s magical because it gives you perspective. The kind of perspective impossible to achieve when you’re in the trenches of your own life. Vacation allows you to hold how you felt while away against how you feel now that you’re back and compare.  Leaving makes you understand things about returning that you never could have realized before you left.

I am a part-time artist. As tame as a declaration as it is, it is an important one for me to state. Outwardly. Inwardly. It’s important because it affects how to build my days and focus my time. It’s also, weirdly, something I didn’t actually realize until very recently.