On a plane headed back to Austin this past weekend, I read part of a borrowed copy of the new Tim Ferriss book, 4 Hour Body. Amidst the chapters on diet and eating habits, something struck me. The author suggested that we should all consider our eating habits to be cyclical. Sometimes we'll feel the need to go into a strict, disciplined mode of eating, and sometimes, for our own sanity, we'll need to relax and indulge our inner epicureans. There is nothing wrong with this, it's just human, and we should accept it. I was dumbstruck. Wait -- you mean we shouldn't beat ourselves over the head for falling off the wagon every now and then? We should just regard it as part of an ongoing process, and continue with whatever feels right for us in that moment, whether it's continuing with a strict healthy eating habit or ... not? Even though this isn't rocket science and I already consciously knew these things, I guess it never sunk in. It was a liberating moment for me, to fully realize that life consists of a series of cycles.
The more I considered this, the more I realized that so many things in life work this way: the economy, diet and exercise habits, general self-discipline, medical and emotional health, happiness, friendships, relationships and falling in and out of love, cash flow, employment, life and death, bad days and good days, individual creativity, art world preferences, blogging frequency. . .
I'm very ambitious, so I set a high bar for myself and have a lot I want to accomplish in my life, the next ten years, the next five years, and so on. But I'm also a perfectionist, which is a rather self-defeating trait. If I set out with a goal that requires rigorous self-discipline, I consider one misstep a complete failure and beat myself up over it -- sometimes to a point where I nearly abandon the entire endeavor. This of course gets me nowhere, but it's something so deeply rooted in my psyche that I haven't been able to shake it. Everyone who knows me well tells me I'm too hard on myself, but I couldn't fathom how to stop. It's kept me locked in the same psychological box since childhood. I think everyone has something like this they're dealing with.
I finally realize now that it's normal to go through a period of heavy, explosive creativity, so intense you can't help but want to work all the time, followed by a tormenting dry spell, where no ideas come or they come so weakly that your better sense, at some point, shoots them down, followed by creativity again. I have several half-finished canvases lying around my studio that I never intend to finish, staring at me, reminding me that I failed, that I painted something that wasn't really that good. Or something that ended up boring me too much. After a painting like Bakery Brawl, which took me over a year to finish because of how much goddamn detail it had, I knew I would come dangerously close to abandoning my studio for a long time if I had to make something that didn't completely fascinate or excite me.
So what is it that I do want to paint? Don't get me wrong, I loved making Bakery Brawl -- certain parts of it. I really loved coming up with the idea, and playing around with the combined imagery. I really loved certain trays of pastries and especially the faces. The faces were my favorite part. So much fun to paint. So guess what? I should paint more faces. Not only that, I should change the face to canvas size ratio. Faces should take up more space on my canvas.
Detail of my latest work in progress, oil on canvas
Sometimes you just have to do what feels right, what you really enjoy, and trust it. The rest will follow. After all, if you're not having fun, why the hell are you doing it?
The past few years have been rough, creatively -- leaving art school and going out into the professional world, trying to figure out my style and voice as an artist, creating new work. I did commissions for a while -- too long, probably -- as a way to stall until I had an idea I really liked. Then I started on Bakery Brawl and was consumed with that. I wonder now if it was an unconscious way of stalling as well, considering how much time it took and how much work went into it. I completely stopped thinking of new painting ideas for a few months there, just because I was so preoccupied with this painting. So much of myself went into it. The two figures in the scene are both me, though it didn't start out that way -- I just needed better photos of those poses and I'm my own most convenient model. Still, the symbolism of fighting with myself in an over-idealized, sweet, tightly painted, but somehow slightly artificial feeling environment is not lost on me.
Bakery Brawl, oil on canvas, 36"x48", 2010. Limited edition giclee prints available.
As I came up for air after finishing that painting, that familiar fear struck my heart. What will I do next? I had a few ideas, and I wrote about them in my art journal (I don't really keep a sketchbook), and I even conjured up the bravery to discuss a few of them with my closest confidants. If I was enthusiastic, it was brief. Every idea deflated from all the holes I poked in them. In retrospect, I realize now that I was overthinking it. I was thinking too specifically, too rigidly about an entire series of 10 or so paintings, instead of starting with one or two ideas for specific paintings, and seeing how it would develop organically. I think I was still reeling from art school critiques, where your peers and professor gather around your work and discuss it in front of you. The entire point is to cut you down and lay you bare, so you hopefully go in a better direction or learn how to better articulate and defend your ideas. For the most part, it's an essential part of the process of becoming a good or decent artist, but it can also do a bit of collateral damage, especially to a perfectionist like me.
Despite my complex relationship to this experience, I felt a sense of loss over the sudden lack of that art community after graduating, so I kept abreast of art news, art criticism, etc. -- all things any art professor would recommend doing. I was already exhausted from writing papers in postmodern art history classes, so as I grew outside of that academic environment, I became especially weary of the art-speak --
that flowery, intentionally dense, overly self-referential postmodern art language style that exists primarily to preserve a sense of eliteness and exclusivity about the art world. That veil of exclusivity keeps the prices for the most canonized, blue-chip work stratospherically high and the bubble intact.
But it also alienates everyone else. I refuse to believe that to write intelligently about art, you must write artist statements or critical essays that sound like something randomly generated by the
Postmodern essay generator.
I both wanted validation by this art world and simultaneously loathed it. And then one day, after years of tiresome back and forth about this in my head (and a bit of wine and half an hour into a Ray Lamontagne concert), the stars aligned, the time was right. I was finally ready to say, fuck it.
The one defining thing I can say about my artistic philosophy at this point is that I want to make art about life, not art about other art. The art that is usually described or critiqued in that dense postmodern language is almost always art about other art; it's self-referential to the nth degree. I generally respect that as one of many valid forms of artistic expression, but ... in most cases, it just doesn't do it for me -- especially when it comes at the expense of aesthetics. It took me a regrettably long time to be able to say that.
I'm following my own internal compass from now on. My passion and focus has always been on the ever-evolving state of contemporary feminine identity, and I like to think of my artistic role as a pulse-taker of this cultural subset as I perceive it. In the end the best thing I can do is make paintings I can't wait to work on every day, and trust in myself -- and in the process -- to figure out what it means to me, and potentially others, in the end. Making art is a process of discovery. Even as the artist, you're not supposed to have all the answers or meaning up front. I forget that a lot.
I feel better already, in every aspect of my life, knowing that I don't always have to be perfect or feel on track towards my goal. Everything happens for a reason, everything has a purpose. Perfection is impossible, and not even desirable (the best paintings were usually mediocre until the inadvertent mistake makes them wonderful). You need the dark to see the light, and vice versa. This is not just a metaphor: I believe it was my high school art teacher who taught me that painted or drawn shadows, places of deep darkness on a canvas, need a bit of light in them to appear real and keep from looking flat.
So you cycle through life, but you never see the same cycle twice. You always learn something, you always get a little better, even if it doesn't feel that way. My half-finished canvases, as much as they make me uncomfortable, gave me physical room and psychological space to figure out what it was I do want to paint, and now I'm joyfully realigning with that. So the next time I have a dry spell, I'll remind myself that it's just a temporary, necessary part of the process, and the great ideas are on their way -- but not before I get through this first.
