Told you so…

This is what will happen! I will post and then the maximum amount of time will go by before guilt makes me stomp down on the mental repugnance I feel over posting. Does anyone else feel this? They must. It feels so incredibly embarrassing to post; I personally feel like it is the height of vanity and self-importance (but only towards myself).

So the holidays went by. Political upheavals, as well 🤢 Maybe this all won’t matter because civilization as we know it will end. Meanwhile, I become addicted to crochet and then embroidery; hiding from the world and myself. Painting has not progressed, though I have finally picked up the wood I need for the next step with my therapy painting.

the weight of it all : self-criticism

The plan is to gesso and sand, then attach the canvas to the board. I will be able to then try encaustic for the first time. I was so inspired by my uncle’s work. I feel like the wax can Ooooze in a way that will truly reflect the weight of a lifetime’s criticism. On paper, in the original sketch, I used charcoal. Great swirling masses of black. How black can I get the wax? I need to mess around with it before I attack the painting. Be honest… I will probably just jump right into it - too excited to wait for tests. Let’s see what happens.

A naive beginning…

So. This is basically my first post… at nearly 43 years old. I never got into the blog world. Social anxieties, awkwardness, you name it. Things a lot of artists seem to be plagued with. It makes me wonder how much unique and beautiful work is out there, unshared. I am calling myself naïve in the ‘unsophisticated’ sense. I may have had an abundance of formal education, but it neither informed me about the social world nor taught me much more than the most rudimentary skills in art. It is really only since graduating from graduate school and failing at a career that I really began to work on my art (and myself, though I would argue this has only really been the last few years of my life). I have struggled to define my art - which is something they Did teach me in school - that I am supposed to label it and be able to stick it in one box. I really don’t like that. My whole being tends to rebel at the thought of such confinement of labels. For a long time I went with ‘expressionistic’. It sounds good. I’m just expressing myself. But if you look at the formal definition, this isn’t quite right.