My Creative Space

Last week has been very rich on stuff to ponder.

First, Milliande invited us to do some pondering about our Body of Work in the CAPI course. I had never heard of it, so I did some research and stumbled upon this article, that gave me quite a shock. "Generally speaking, people don't want to know how versatile you are! With very few excerptions, I think you have to specialize for a long time before you can allow yourself the luxury of versatility." says Martha Marshall. It gave me some really heavy stuff to ponder, as I always found series of art works boring as a creator and as a viewer as well. My conclusion so far: a series of cohesive art works is kind of one work in many (at least a dozen) pieces. And I discovered some small series among my creations already created without ever thinking about it. Another participant from the CAPI course showed us this article, that helped me even more to see the point in creating in series. So I have my pondering cap on and am ready to create more in series from now on :)

Another object to ponder emerged, when I started a new intuitive painting and discovered not for the first time, that I really like the first layer and am not sure, if and how much I should add to it.

This happens again and again, and not only once I've liked the end result after many layers less than the first ones. Maybe I should start looking for ways to sell my "backgrounds"? Discussing this in my favourite art groups and doing dome research, the theme of a focal point emerged as well, and this article by Dianne Mize helped me to move forward. So I started to add to the painting, but was doing it carefully not to loose, what I had. After the second layer it looked nice, but gave me a somewhat shallow and incomplete feeling.

That day, I stumbled upon the 7 Painting Tips by Daniel Edmondson and they helped me to be brave and push forward. After 3 days of intense painting-scrubbing off-painting, the "Blooms of the Night" as I call it could be overall finished.

I still see some spots, that need a little tweaking, but I really like the result and am happy I didn't stop earlier. I'm not sure, if this will help me with my next creation, but one thing I'll probably do never again. The pretty large piece (27x70 cm) of corrugated card board I used as the surface is all deformed and was really hard to handle in my tiny painting space of about 3 square meters, as I couldn't hang it on the wall.

Sorry for the many words in my strange English, but all that pondering was an important part of my last week's creative process. Sorry for the still shaky quality of the images as well. The card reader sent by a dear Facebook friend all the way from the US arrived (YAY!), but I haven't figured out yet, how to make it work with at least one of our computers.

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