Friday June 18, 2010

Friday the last day of the work-week, if one is getting paid for what they do. But to an artist, Friday is just another opportunity to try to get it "right." The morning is quiet, the sun is shinning.

I have been working with gouache for a very long time. There are advantages to working with gouache; it is a beautiful medium, it is a clean medium, you can work on paper, therefore you can store a lot of works in a small space, and there is a special quality to the color. But on the other hand I have been wanting to return to oils. I got some paper at the art supply that is supposed to be for oils, I decided yesterday I would try it. It seems I have to work up to a change in medium. I don't know for sure what the reluctance is? And yet my desire for change, seems stronger than the need to continue in the same way. I think of myself, as an artist, like a big ship, and it takes time to change directions. I have always been told just to shake things up a bit, change your medium...and I have always followed that advise.

As I create new works in this series, Poems of The Desert, I realize what I am "getting at." It is Desert as actual place or as a metaphor for a part of the creative process. Sometimes we feel "lost" with out new ideas, we seem to be wandering in a wasteland. We wonder if we will ever have another new idea?

We are told, as artists, to paint what we love. And I am also painting Desert as actual place. "This land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write (paint), unless paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink (paint) the broken line of wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away. Even then, does anything written (painted) ever matter to the earth, wind and sky?" --Joy Harjo, Secrets from the Center of the World.