Well, it has been quite a while since I have written an entry and it has been quite a while since I have been moved to create images. I think this is the longest spell I have gone without painting. Sketching and doodling yes, but painting - no. What is the difference? The former come easily and the latter requires such effort that unless conditions are ripe it does not occur. Painting is not dissimilar from trying to write this Substack. Neither are an action of just responding ( sketching) or playing (doodling) but they are an integration of thought and experience and learning, an identification of a theme and then the building of a method to weave the threads that make up that theme. Sometimes days, and in this case months, go by before those threads’ relationships become apparent enough to reveal the patterns that evoke the theme, the thought, the revelation, the epiphany.
Is it a slump? a period of dormancy? or an indulgence in passivity? Does it matter which? Why try to understand the lack of creative action? I think because if we understand the cause we clear our creative palette to be ready for the epiphany. Today the threads began to weave making a clearer pattern.
This period of what I think was all three- a slump, a dormancy tied up with a touch of passivity, began during that pervasive, insidious somewhat malignant spell in November. After lots of work both creative and mundane (as in not magical) toward a social obligation and passion, a feeling of lack of agency wormed its way into my psychic. And if painting is anything it is about articulating agency. That debilitating belief that no matter what one does it makes no difference slipped into my expired immunized awareness. But last night I was listening to HCR’s session when she answers political questions and she discussed ‘agency’. And on this rainy, windy New Year’s morning I stood and watched the lanyard on the key to the gallery being tossed by gales whipping up Main Street and there it was the other thread. That lanyard has no agency. What thought and feeling does that lanyard evoke? What is my understanding of what I am seeing and not the social narrative of ‘alone blowing in a rainy wind’? What is MY understanding separate from how we are conditioned to think of it? Do I have something to add to the social story or am I just repeating what I have learned or been told to feel?
The epiphany is - creative expression is claiming one’s agency by seeking Truth by not being sucked into emotional wind tunnels that buffet one around shaving off the sharper edges of curiosity, resilience, rigorous questioning and wonder.
I commit to rigorously pursuing creative thought and expression as we enter this New Year. And I commit to Sending it forth into the cosmos even if I feel it goes unheard and unseen. And I commit to being receptive to rigorous questioning and critique from any who wish to engage.
Also if you prefer not to post a public comment email me at who@whopaints.com.
Thanks for this one, Wendilee! Some, not reading closely enough, might dismiss the message as being merely permission for an artist to blame a "down time" in creativity on the capriciousness of her muse, but your observations are much more complex. Yes, it's okay to have a time when we're not creating, and while it's partially okay (in my opinion) to explain that away by saying that creativity occasionally needs time to simmer ingredients on the back burner of one's brain, the idea of agency, of purposely paying attention to those ingredients and the inspirations around us, brings a whole new level of ongoing inspiration to create. At least, that's what I'm taking from it. 😊