I took only a short break at home so that I could come back to Boston early and work on a couple of paintings. There is a competition that I would like to enter on the 31st, so I am desperately trying to finish up a last painting for it. Whenever I enter these competitions I feel so out of place with my work. I feel self conscious and uncertain of myself. Self deprecating. Sometimes I feel like combining photography, painting, writing, journaling, and even some psychology together is incredibly innovative. Sometimes I feel like I have spread myself so thin that I can’t excel and it’s tiring to write artist statements.
I am right now so happy at Roca. I am doing a bit of everything I love, but I also know that once the Hine Fellowship is over I will have to fight for a way to combine my interests once again. When I think back to my favorite college professors, the ones that were most inspiring were always the ones that had broad interests. I had a couple of professors who pursued many different interests within a field. I had many other professors had extremely limited interests (I can’t imagine devoting my life to a topic such as best friend relationships between same sex dyads in a controlled environment.) I hope that I will find some way to combine my interests like some of those professors did. On good days I’m convinced that there is a way.
This painting I’m working on right now is all consuming and emotionally draining. It seems with painting there are some paintings that just flow and others that creak along slowly and painfully. The mistakes are so visible, so unavoidable. I can’t be in the same room with the painting right now, parts of it are so bothersome that I can only stop working on it by avoiding it all together.
Doug Martinson, my figure painting professor in college, told me before I graduated that I should only date artists who weren’t painters. He had found true love in a dancer and said that only another artist could understand the torment of a failing painting. He also was certain that dating a painter would drive me into competitive insanity. I think about this sometimes when I’m in the bedroom painting with the door closed and Eli is in the living room editing his photos or working on a website. It’s worked living with Eli because he understands that on a painting day I probably will not leave the house, eat at a normal hour, clean up the house, and I may have to open a bottle of wine if things aren’t going well. I think Doug’s advice was good advice.
Matt Searles said on February 5th, 2008 at 12:10 pm:
Reminds me a little of Marry Cassatt, with a little of that new fangled Japanese stuff. I dig it.
I soooo understand that feeling of trying to put your self out there.. and the self doubt / self consciousness that goes along with that… Plus the feeling where.. you’re like synthesizing this different stuff that seems to have amazing possibilities… but then if you look at any of the constituent parts your synthesizing.. because you seem to be taking on so much, you can never be such a master of those constituent elements.. I mean someone could spend a life time with just that one thing, and still never fully explore all it has to offer… and yet at the same time.. who wants to walk around life with blinders on? Seems like the only way you’re true potential can be realized is via following your bliss… but why does bliss have to be so incognazent of.. well reality?
On the other hand innovation comes from the resynthesis of formally disparate elements. And isn’t the difference between the new synthesis, and the disparate parts, a kind of lexicographical construct? (I mean in the sense that we become masters of the new synthesis, which is equal in side as any of the other parts, if I’m making sense) Its more about the questions people where asking yesterday, then our new questions. And doesn’t the artist job having something to do with a kind of spiritual dream?
I don’t know.. my work has a kind of Jungian like foundation to it.. inside of which there is a questing for a larger wholeness.. where you try to pursue a totality of your potential in a way that is emancipated from the thou shalt dictates of.. well that you would have if bliss was more cognizant of “reality.” Which really has more to with reality concepts.. a sort presumption of what wishes might find fulfillment (to use the language of psychoanalysis) and isn’t art supposed to break through those presumptions to a more direct experience of reality? And via that remind us of something deeper?
How’s that for a crazy blog comment?