STUDIO UPDATE
Sharing with you today, there has been a stirring in the studio, not in a busy sense there is always that but this stirring has been a bit deeper. Perhaps it is a shifting rather than a stirring.
The past couple of months I have been busy with classes both out and about and private classes in my studio. I love my classes and my students so much it brings me joy and I always learn something from them just as much as they (I hope) gain from me. Whilst that is productive and useful and I feel so grateful to be able to offer this on a weekly basis, on the art front I have been a bit quiet. There was a quiet pause from creating…so basically I have been waiting. I wanted for the spark to ignite while I waited and there were a few flickers here and there but nothing substantial. Weeks and months have gone by I waited and I waited and it didn’t come but I have been doing this a while now to know that it will come back sometimes you just need to rest do little things and patient. I was lucky enough to be able to go on a little holiday over to Adelaide, I have never been before and whilst having a cruise around exploring the sites, I resisted going to the Adelaide art gallery art was the last thing I felt like looking at and with a bit of a push next thing I knew I was looking around and BANG!!! there I found a spark. The spark took me back to my old loves, realism and oil painting, which if I listen carefully is always there and part of what inspired me to start painting in the first place. The interesting thing that also came with the sparks was something much bigger than the style and the technique used to create the painting, it’s about the story. I saw a few exhibitions on my holiday and I came at them with an open mind. I was simply watched observed which artist, which paintings were pulling me. Which ones were stirring in me things that haven’t really been stirring for a while creative wise. The ones that did were all of a similar genre, of a similar theme, and these are all the same that can be related back to Artists I studied and saw when i was a teenager travelling in Denmark and visited artists which was why I started painting in the first place. For something to still be doing something for me after all these years, that has to mean something, I need to listen to that, for reason I somehow decided along the line that MY story, MY version, MY expression was not big enough, strong enough, important enough to hold its place in my artwork, as well as all of that I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, what I stood for. So whilst I could write a really long post about all of this I am going to hold this here as I really don’t have a conclusion just yet. I am just going to share with you the progress of all of this so far and what is coming out of the studio. There will I hope be more to this story that comes, for now though I finally have the courage to no only hear it myself but also tell it through this painting. More to come on this one its NOT finished … let me know what you think, what does this one say to you?