New work in progress
Untitled work in progress, 40 x 30 inches, ©2010 Deidre Adams
Well, I don’t know exactly what happened, but after a summer spent mostly unfocused and adrift, I have returned to painting with a vengeance. Maybe it was the change of the seasons, maybe it was getting some lingering projects finished, maybe it was limiting my Facebook and web-surfing time. Or maybe it was going to Ohio — so much yummy urban enchantment & so many fantastic surfaces — plus a change of scenery always does me a world of good. Whatever it was, I now have no fewer than 15 paintings and 4 textile works in progress.
A large part of my creative funk probably had to do with finishing school. As much as I complained and whined about the forced manner of the assignments, of having to do things I didn’t really feel fit with my vision, the truth is that I loved having a place to go and a community to be a part of. Being completely on my own is a two-edged sword: I am for the most part an introvert and find it hard to work with lots of noise going on around me, but on the other hand, the company can get kind of boring when it’s just me.
And my other problem stemmed from the normal letdown after a show is over and all the work comes back and is sitting there in the living room waiting to be stored. The sustained push to create all the work for my thesis gave me an energy that’s hard to maintain when there isn’t the goal of a show looming. It was easy to make excuses — I can’t make panels by myself, I can’t be creative when xyz is going on, etc.
But a little over a week ago, I was rummaging around in my basement for something, and I came across some canvases I had purchased a while back to use in class assignments. Over the last couple of years, I had bought quite a few of these when I found sales. Then we learned how to make our own canvases and panels. By about the 3rd semester of painting class, you are shamed into forgoing the purchased canvases in favor of either making your own (a pain if you’re just not into the whole scary electric saw thing) or buying them custom-made (expensive, and difficult to find someone who can make them to your standards at a price you can afford to pay). In any case, I had a large assortment of purchased canvases on hand, and I thought, why not just get a couple out and throw some paint on them, can’t hurt, right? I had to trick myself into getting back to work. “Self,” I said, “Now, you’re not really doing ‘serious’ work here, you’re just playing around, and if you make something really crappy, no one need ever know. So it’s OK. Go ahead.”
Untitled work in progress, 12 x 12 inches, ©2010 Deidre Adams
And that was all there was to it. I’ve been completely in the groove, just painting away the hours, totally absorbed. It’s that best possible art-making state, when the works just flows; it’s like a meditation, relaxed and most pleasant, and the realization that it’s time to stop and eat or do something else or go to bed or whatever is just plain annoying. This is how it should be.
