An unpainted canvas ...

It sits quietly in my studio. So lovely in white and sealed in it's protective plastic wrapping. It waits patiently, with no complaints or grumbling at my attempts to ignore it's presence, though I'm all too well aware of it leaning there against the wall every time I walk into the room. The current bane of my artistic existence. An unpainted canvas.

It's a sad thing to admit, but I'm stuck somewhere in limbo on painting. Stumped. Stupefied. I have the desire, an undeniable urge to paint, only I do not have a clue about what I want to paint. Right this very minute, as I type this, I want to get up, walk down the hall to the studio and pick up my paintbrush. Instead of doing it, I'm blogging about it. Truth is, I'm not one of those artists who can just wander into the studio and start slinging paint on a canvas and Ta Da! New painting begins. I don't really feel I have that kind of talent.

I usually need a 'game plan' of what I'm going to put on the paper (or canvas). I need some preliminary starting point and then I can get busy with paint slinging. Now, I'm most definitely not one of those artists who has to do a complete, detailed sketch of the image. But I do like to have something to work from, maybe a photo or an image I've tinkered around with in Photoshop. Reference material. Once I have that I'm generally good to go. When the actual painting process starts I can even deviate from the planned image if the mood strikes me. But I have to have that starting place.

Right now my studio floor is covered with books, magazines, old calendars and assorted art images I've collected. I got out all the stuff that sparked my interest and sat on the floor in the middle of it for hours the other day, trying to 'see' something inspirational. Alas, I just found myself flipping pages, looking at other artist's work and daydreaming. I know there's an idea lurking in the back of my brain, slowly forming into something. The problem is finding a way to push it to the forefront and get it out on canvas.

That's the only part I am sure of at this time ... I want to work with the acrylics on canvas. It's the subject matter which eludes me. Well, that's not exactly true. I keep thinking of some kind of image representing the seven Chakras. I see a female form somehow in motion, the colors of the energy centers both within the form and swirling around it, and a dark yet hazy background of stars. That's about all I've come up with. While that may sound like I've got a reasonably good image idea, the way the figure should be in motion is undecided. The way the Chakras would flow is undecided. The background is still really undecided. So, no, I don't have a good image idea yet.

I think the problem is that I don't want it to be a traditional, typical, cliche' Chakra painting. I don't want it to be a re-hash of something already done. After all, how many other artists have painted the very same subject matter? Probably a gazillion and two. I'd just be a gazillion and three if I don't figure out a way to make it different. Conundrum.

I can't help but wonder if I should just put it on the back burner and work on something else until the image becomes more clear. The problem with that is I've done it before and the image I was once so excited about doing, as this one, gets lost in the abyss of the "want to but never done" pile. The enthusiasm shifts and is gone. It's hard for me to recapture it.

Thing is, I keep thinking about a friend of mine (and yes, I'm talking about YOU - and you know who YOU are!) who can go into her studio and just start working. She may have no clear image in mind, or maybe just a quick sketch in her sketchbook. She grabs up a piece of charcoal, a canvas, draws out a rough sketch and begins to paint. Now, her work is not as photo realistic as mine tends to be. She is not always as accurate with proportion, perspective, shading, etc. as I'm inclined to get so caught up with. She just starts working and goes intuitively with the process, letting it become whatever seems to work at that moment. If isn't working, she has no remorse in slapping a fresh coat of gesso over the whole thing and starting over. It amazes me. It intimidates me. And yes, I'm envious of how she does it. I'm even more envious of the fact that her work is incredibly beautiful as well.

I have another friend who is the opposite. He will spend more time 'prepping' to do a painting than he actually spends painting. He can work for days on layout & design, colors, light & shadow, proportion, the whole kit and kaboodle. He gets as much enjoyment from his hours of mixing colors on a scrap piece of paper as he gets from actually painting. I've seen him spend weeks at the prep stage and take less than half that time to finish the final piece of work. His work, I might add, is also incredibly beautiful.

I fall somewhere in between the two. I can't just sketch something off, but I can't spend weeks in the planning stage without losing interest altogether. I know it's different for everyone who creates art. I know we all have to work in the way which is best for us individually. I know it's a waste of my time and energy to pay attention to anyone else's process save my own ... because in the long run, my own is the only one that matters to me in respect toward creating my own art. I get it. I understand it. Doesn't change a thing at the moment. I'm still stuck and don't know what to do.

It's times like this that I wish I had a formal education in art. I wish I had been able to go to a fine art college, spent time developing the basic skills, the fundamentals, the foundation that many artists have. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. I'm a self-taught artist. In a way, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I haven't studied under some master, learned their method and now crank out work that looks like someone else's. I have had to work at developing my own techniques, my own understanding of the mediums I use, and my own style of working with those mediums. At times it's been an uphill battle, other times it just seemed to click into place.

For now, I seem to be having another uphill battle which I'm not at all happy about. What I should probably do is just go into the studio, grab an old canvas and start an abstract. I did that with Path of Least Resistance and personally speaking, I think it turned out rather nicely. I remember being stuck, as I am now, and I decided to have a go with creating an abstract.

Early one morning I laid a big towel in the middle of the studio floor (to protect the carpet), grabbed an old canvas which had belonged to my father and laid it on the towel. I gessoed the canvas, addeding some texture medium to it as well. Then I dug through my paints, picked out ones that appealed to me, and started squirting them on the canvas. *I use those cheap-o liquid acrylics most people use for craft projects.* I didn't bother to decide if the image would be vertical or horizontal, I just pushed the paint around until an idea popped into my head. I kept thinking about water. More specifically, I was thinking about the creek that runs beside my favorite camping spot.

The afternoon of the last time I was there, getting things packed up to go home, I went over to the the edge of the creek to wash out my coffee pot. Squatting there, scrubbing the pot with sand, I happened to look over and noticed the way the water diverted itself along the edge of the creek into tiny little tributaries all through the dark earth, around pieces of leaves and moss on the bank. It wound it's way around small stones and flecks of silvery mica. I thought about how people used to pan for gold in creeks exactly like the one I was beside. Hoping to strike it rich.

I finished washing the coffee pot and looked at the woods around me, at the water flowing it's course over rocks and sand, the blue of the sky through the tree tops. I thought to myself that once, a long time ago in that very place, I believed I had found my own form of gold. That is a story I won't go into now, but suffice it to say it didn't work out as I had hoped it would. I sat on that creek bank and cried, both terribly sad over the loss and yet deeply grateful for the experience. I realized the memory was all the "gold" I had left and I did indeed treasure it.

With that memory playing through my head, I worked on the abstract all day and into the evening. I crawling around on my knees, working from all sides of the canvas, not really paying attention to what I was doing so much as thinking, remembering that place, that time, and the feelings I had experienced. I put all of that onto the canvas. Late that night, after I was done, I finally stood up and looked at the work. Considering I had never painted an abstract before, I was pretty pleased with the results. The title of the painting came to mind, a double meaning representing both how water follows the path of least resistance, and also, in contrast, how the path my life had flowed since I had thought I'd found 'gold' - in opposition of what I had believed.

So, I'm wondering if maybe I should try that again. Try not painting with a particular image or photo, but work "from a memory" on the canvas instead. Hmmmmm ... sounds like a good idea. Think I'll go do that now.