Weighted Inspiration

Image note: A piece from before the ball formation.I had an incredible art day yesterday with my Mom, watercolorist Lynn Powers. We spent the day completely immersed in art. We browsed design stores, looked through the entire Modern Art wing of the Portland Art Museum (brought there by the Lucian Freud triptych), shopped materials at Dick Blick and then traveled back to my east side apartment to look at vector work I’m doing for her and discussed my current work. In between each of these things we were mostly talking art. Where we are. Where we want to go. What challenges we are facing. How we are going to overcome them.

The entire day was perfect, but it left me feeling heavy. Not sad but weighted. And weighted is a hard way to paint.

I tried to paint through it last night and ended up in frustrating corners. I tried to paint through it this morning and am still finding myself back in those same corners. And the weight is still there.

But I’m starting to understand what it is. It’s thought. It’s information. It’s paths I might take but am not ready to take this weekend. It’s a list of things I need to think about but am not quite ready to think about. It’s hundreds and hundreds of pieces of information from how I felt about a few artists I saw to what story are my paintings telling. And it’s all of this stuck in some sort of giant dense ball in my brain. And it keeps rolling from side to side and I can feel it in there needing attention.

But the only way to give it attention, to give each of those hundreds things a piece of thought is to just let that information sit in there for a few days. Let pieces fall away and slowly process.

And in the meantime I will keep pushing through the frustrating corners but give myself permission to spend a bit more time organizing stamps or designing stencils. Hopefully, slowly, the weight will lift and I can put those thoughts into use instead of having them just weigh me down unattended.