November 4, 2014 – I started the day really crabby…

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I woke up yesterday morning in the worst, dark funk.  I’ve not been sleeping well, but that’s been the case on and off for over two years now.  This felt like something else.  I spent a lot of the weekend doing things that needed doing – stocking the larder (Costco, Trader Joe’s…), laundry, cooking for a family dinner – all things we  have to do – and that I do all the time, quite happily. I’m a very domestic lady and I really like keeping house.  But the studio has been still and dark a whole lot in the last weeks. With preparing for, leading and then recovering my energies from my first retreat and what seems like more teaching/leading than ever, I’ve found the impetus to go make my own art languishing. For the second weekend in a row, I told myself at the start I’d spend a lot of time painting, drawing, playing with color.  And I didn’t.  I just found myself pulled away by other things, with a remote sense that I wasn’t in my studio…

Sunday morning, just after awaking, I found myself tossing about in my head how I might set up a color mixing panel to play with the colors that can be made with three paints/pigments. It’s something I started in the color class that I led in October and has been a puzzle ever since. So hopped out of bed, made my warm lemon water and cozied up in my chair at my painting table.  I sat there in my fuzzy pink bathrobe and furry slippers playing with color arrangements.  I hadn’t even brushed my teeth! It’s something my logic brain loves – a puzzle! I spent an hour sorting out what to do and then mixing colors. Heaven.

I ended up figuring out a way to fill the 12×6 squares in a logical way to explore the range of color.  Who knew that we could make all these gorgeous and varied colors with just three pigments?  There is a part of me that loves just looking at the colors and another loves creating structure out of a jumble.  I’m an organizer-artist!  I had so much fun!  But then the rest of the day, I never circled back.

What all this showed me is that I must, must, must have some kind of play in my art-life, as well as simply giving myself the time to immerse in what I want to paint. I’ve been so focused on my desire to help others free their creativity that I’ve been starving mine in a way. I did finish “Rest” recently, and have been working in bits here and there on a sweet doggy portrait.  I’ve got four paintings that have been started over the past year or so and are nagging me to finish them. This is not what I’m craving. Maybe it’s what is keeping me from painting – and making me crabby – my telling myself I ought to finish them – like finishing my homework, rather than sink my brushes into the rain-dropped Fuyu persimmons that I took while up in Healdsburg, the day after the retreat.  This is the *photo* below (the painting will come):

Tomorrow I am teaching a Photoshop Elements for Artists class for the first time, and I’m not yet all ready (I’m one who gives merit to the saying “if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done” – it’s just how I roll!).  So, today will hold more time on the computer – so that I can help others do the fun and satisfying composition work with software, before starting to draw and paint.  I did a bunch of work on the persimmon image above. It’s a key part of my process.  I love using technology to compose.  These tools are here at our disposal, so why not?

But – AND, I know that unless I carve out time to play with my brushes, or at least draw the persimmons, I will not be who I need to be tomorrow for them.

Sometime last year, I had this insight:  after having been a teacher and guide for other watercolorists for a few years now, my experience is that this is what I’m made for. There are lots of skilled and inspiring artists in the world.  If I think about how I was put together and the life that has lead me to where I am, being with people in their creative journeys (which are really their life journeys) is what I’m “meant” to do.  What followed was that I knew I must continue to paint my own paintings, because I need to stay in my own art-making process in order to best serve them in theirs, otherwise I’d be out of touch and could not have integrity in what I said to them, especially when it gets hard, which is often!

Today, this insight expands. Yes, I’m meant to teach, but there are paintings in me and they want out!  And when they are not let out, I am a very unhappy human.  There is a quote from a chapter heading in Dawna Markova’s “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life,” attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of St. Thomas.  I recently wrote it out, all colorful and playful.

It’s a bit intense, but Jesus was intense!  I have loved this idea, been emboldened by it, but yesterday and today, I feel it.  I started yesterday by making a huge, long to-do list, and ended up getting hardly any of it got done.  The art-maker had blockaded my “productivity” in protest!  I think it’s worse once we have given our lives, ourselves to our creative expression, once the flow gets really going, it’s much more painful when it’s stopped.  Take heed of that art-maker! She/He is quite a force!

To your creative expression –

Cara