Always, always a weird one; how things change internally in your mind from day to day. One of the things I love about meditation is how it encourages you to watch, observe your moods and reactions impassively to see how things affect you - so much to be learnt instead of accepting 'how I feel' as 'how it must be'. Spent last night drawing totally uninspired angels on a Scottish theme in a futile attempt to find a way forward with combining the 'local art' thing with my own style and inspiration. Doesn't work, by the way -how many times have I learnt, relearnt this? I just end up with dodgy caricatures of Braveheart Scots with rough tartan and ginger hair. Hmmm, think this might just have been done to death and with my heart clearly not in it in the slightest its not exactly going to set my world on fire.
Then, driving into town for creative frustration (more later) I passed an awesome urban angel crossing the road at a junction who looked like a crazy walking 21st century Chagall; totally glowing red/orange mohican that was left long and down so the effect was more halo than aggression and a fabulous snub-nosed baby teen face. Stopped the car to scribble and hope it comes to pass that she sees the resulting painting one day and smiles.
Looked at a slideshow of Chagalls on the web this morning that was drawn to my attention by Facebook, wondering again how the old masters of modern art would have dealt with the new media and used it to their creative ends. Would have been great to see. I was drawn once more to his use of colour, sometimes fauvist and sometimes so sparing; just one crazy orange sun with the most subtle blues filling the rest of the frame. Calming down my technicolour splurges is something I am constantly working on; it can be so much more powerful to use the colour sparingly and still capture the power it has. A tiny turquoise tile among terracotta has infinitely more power than a whole swimming pool of green blue. Unless the pool is seen from a distance among ochre grey hills. You get my feeling.
Argh. Saw a painful thing today which tempted me to art anarchy; a shop in a genteel area of the city was punting a terrible Klimt copy in the front window among some pretty classy furniture, the irony apparently lost on the (moronic) window dresser. To add insult to injury it was pasted with a garish 'reduced' sticker - buy our sophisticated meubles and we will chuck in this crappy insult to art to really add a touch of je ne sais quoi to your contemporary but classic living space.
Vomit. Sorry, sometimes the art student in me is dangerously close to the surface.
It is times like these I remember with fondness a now-far-more-sensible friend who would smear his kebab wrapper on 4x4s on the way home of an evening.
So the only down point of the day was frustration at the crazy creatives of the world who still interpret deadlines in a hazy fashion and fail to catch the importance of my quest to fuse artistic life with commerce; ie: be a self sufficent painter. One thing I am grateful for in my years as a restaurant/event manager is the organisational skills it has furnished me with - I was always a list writer extrodinaire but I do now take pride in my ability to make things reality.
Just means that I can get frustrated at happenings like today when the ordered ten frames are actually one; I understand the backstory - it was so I could see if it was what I wanted - but now another seven days will elapse before I am able to get them painted. Another seven before I can take them out on the road to find someone to sell them... I mean, there's no rush to be honest, I am only working on the ambition of breaking even just now; covering my own paint and framing costs, but a utopian dream of self sufficiency still glimmers on the (shifting) horizon...
Away to create; paint angels and frames and relax into the timescale I am given. I have a stinky cold anyway so I shall not be building Rome today. Sorry, please come back next week.
Oh, and dinner tonight is a super fave one-hundred-ways-with-mince classic; lamb koftas with toasted pitta, salad and sweet potato dhal. Dahl? How dya spell it - spellcheck no know!
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