Monday 26 October 2015

Creating Art - Number 1 Priority

Detail: Perhaps an eagle or an owl

1: Some papers to use as collage
It's been a while since I blogged and although not as long it's also been a while since I created art.  I had got into the swing of blogging, or so I thought, then something came along and I missed a week.  The week grew into a month and here I am now several months later.  I did manage to keep creating art for a while spending many days, evenings and even nights into the wee small hours painting in my studio.




2: The collaged page
Then life seemed to strike.  First, I was hit by what I assume was some kind of bug that resulted in dreadful fatigue.  As much as I wanted to paint, I just didn't have the energy to do anything very much.  Then I had what I can only describe as 'artists block'.  This descended deeper into feeling like I just couldn't be bothered painting and in fact it got to the stage where I thought I might never paint again.

More life has been happening the last few weeks and while I did want to paint I just didn't get the time to or when I did I was way to tired because of everything else I was doing.


3: I was drawn to bright acrylics
Today, although I had a lot to do I decided that I just had to paint.  I had a list of things to do as long as my arm but when I sat down this morning to have a cup of coffee and was going to watch something on YouTube I realised that if I had time to do that then I had time to paint.

4: But then toned down with some white gesso
And so I set my phone timer for one hour knowing that I could easily afford that amount of time before there were other things including appointments that I couldn't change. But for that hour creating art was my number 1 priority.

It was so good to feel paper and paints and oil pastels.  The outcome is the piece featured here which is still a work in progress.  It still needs a fair bit of work but it was just so good to get back to creating.
I've made some fairly large and significant changes in my life in order to be able to devote more time to focussing on my art.  I realised today that while I have dreams and hopes relating to my art I've let my self be derailed over the last few weeks and months.  I need to make art a priority more often and I need to set out in more detail how I am going to work towards turning my dreams and hopes into reality.  For today though, I'm just pleased to be back creating and blogging.


5: Less than an hour later - tree, rocks and perhaps an emerging eagle or owl