I’m starting over again.
I squirted a couple dozen shiny, bright blobs of oil paint onto my ancient
glass palette, unleashing the smell of linseed and terror. I don’t even know
why painting scares me. It feels a little like a dream in which I’m trying to fly
but can only manage longish leaps with lots of useless arm flapping.
I work too hard at everything, and my life responds by
eagerly meeting my frenetic activity with frenetic demand. I have the sense
that art shouldn’t be so much work.
The hardest part is always starting…and starting again…and
again. Once I’m working I begin to see in paint and ink and graphite. I begin
to see in full color again as art meets life and visions unfold like dreams.
I know the rewards of painting. It isn’t the product on the
canvas, though sometimes that does, against all odds, have merit. It’s the way
painting makes me see and think and feel. Traditionally it makes me feel a bit
manic because I have to really psych myself up to even try to paint, and then I
often crash and burn afterward. It makes me moody, but that’s probably a more
honest way for me to be, given the life I’ve made for myself. Moody and half
wild beats the dessicated, somnolent version of myself that I drag from task to
task most of the time. I suspect now that I’m too tired to generate much mania
and will have to content myself with doggedness.
This time I’m starting with Anguilla, a mashup of a painting
I fell in love with at the villa we stayed in and the feeling of floating warm
and buoyant on the clear salt sea under golden sunlight. Anguilla was a
vacation from the frenzy that is my life. My only objective was to rest and to
simply be. Naturally I found a bit of space opening up in my mind and heart. As
the first flight took us up and away from Seattle I felt myself disentangling
from all my obligations, all the tentacles of demand snapping back on
themselves, my big messy life falling behind and folding in on itself like a
dead spider. With a bit more distance I found I could look back at it with some
perspective. I could see themes and meanings emerging, whereas when I was fully
entangled I could only see immediate needs and impending disasters. From
Anguilla my home life looked like a vignette in a snow globe or a doll’s house.
Now I have started painting again and it feels like I’ve
opened a big world of color and texture and confusion. It’s going to take
patience and doggedness to make any sense of it. I see surrealism, selfies,
color, houses….not at all what I imagined before I started. I’ve done this
enough times to realize that’s a good thing.
The easel is where the things you thought you wanted to paint go to die
and where the paint whispers what it needs you to do.
