I woke up with still no idea as to what to do. I felt like I needed a plan, but hadn’t one so picked up from yesterdays drawing and worked on the proportions of the figures – 3 interlaced in an embrace. I did not have a protein shake today. Mondays shake triggered IBS symptoms – too much insoluble fibre so early in the day for my tender tum. I completely forgot about setting up music. I slipped into the flow easily. The street noises and peoples movements around the apartment block was ryhtmn enough today.
Two hours in and the composition still wasn’t working for me. I painted it. It looked shit (as far as I was concerned). My gremlins kicked in telling me how my work really is shit and not anywhere as good as anything in the exhibition I saw after to work yesterday at Framer Framed. The words flat, messy, tacky, pathetic, crap etc. rang in my head. The gremlins then started to tell me how no one is interested in what I’m doing, the idea won’t work, I’m wasting this precious 3 hours of time: I had emails to respond to and shit to clean up (washing up from monday night still waiting). I stuck my middle finger up to the voices and continued, wondering if this composition would be best managed in photoshop where I could manipulate size and colours of figures easily – still a gremlin voice, just a more seductive and reasoned one. I allowed that thought to sit with me a moment then realised I wanted to use water colour paint, I do NOT want to spend my creative time on a computer. Im not that kind of artist. Technology has its uses in art, but i like mess! Tactile things in my hands. The paint became uneven and stodgy. Ugh! I persevered. I lost sight of the outlines of the figures under the uneven paint. My heart sant 😦 Without thinking i grabbed a 2B pencil and went over the faint lines i could barely see. The graphite left a silver-grey sheen and really worked against the colours i mixed! I felt a bit better 🙂
15mins before the end of my 3 hours, I had an ‘I wonder if…’ moment and did another quick trace of the composition, omitting one of the figures. Voila! It looked MUCH better, much closer to the felt sense of what I was aiming for. The three hours was not wasted after all!
Lessons learned today – I realised I needed to trudge through the shitty compositions, awful painting (my judgements, i know) and extreme self-doubts and attempts at self-sabotage to get to my ‘Voila!’ moment. Important rule: ‘Just keep going and get shit done. No judgements, no shame, no blame, no worrying! Ignore all that and keep your nose to the grindstone and KEEP WORKING!’ . Theres time for all that self flagellation the rest of the day. Oddly enough I felt BETTER, much more positive about the work i did during my 3 hours when i looked back on my efforts this evening. Im sure i still have a long way to go with the piece I’m working on and my ideas in general, but the good thing is that i’ve not given up 😀
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