Deep diving into my art making space

‘Ode To An Irish Flower’, acrylic on paper, 9” x 12”, $145.00. Find it here.

One of the best gifts I’ve given myself this autumn has been the permission to not have to produce any art at all.

It’s not about how much I put out there, share on my site or social media. I’ve decided to give myself space from that internal drive to produce more work, and that all of it has to be good. So I’ve been giving myself a time out, to reset the whole space so it works better for me.

First and foremost, I want my art making space to be magical and fun for me, so that’s what I’m creating, and having. I’m finding my way into a whole new kind of art making, one that is as free as I can possibly make it of self judgment and comparison to others. I know that despite my wish to stay in my own lane and just make what works for me, at some point I will be showing and selling my work again in a broader way. Whether on my own, or through galleries or shows, I’ll be putting it out there. So I’m doing my best now to deprogram all of the negative energy out, all of the self comparisons, the invalidation, the competition. The leftovers from the past.

There’s no competition for any of us, when we are being who we really are.

Nobody can be you the way you can be you. Nobody can be me the way I’m doing it. One thing I trust implicitly is that I will keep on being me, in the best way I know how to be. This means that my art will only ever come from me, when I am being me. It’s more fun to live this way. If I don’t need approval from others, oh my, what am I capable of creating and having?

Because we are deeply programmed from growing up in a capitalist economic mindset and way of thinking, we tend to work from a set of pictures and beliefs that we are never enough as we are, and need to prove we have value.

Proving value is different from knowing you have value. What is seen as having value is skewed, if profit is always a consideration. ‘That’s just the way it is’ isn’t real. The way it currently ‘is’ is something we all show up for, help perpetuate and continue, and don’t even realize most of the time that we are doing this. This way of thinking and seeing ourselves affects how we enjoy our creativity and life, and what we spend our attention and energy on.

Often this comes down to: what is considered to have value, to be valuable?

How do others see it or value it? When we base our own value on the opinions of others rather than from a place of finding it within us, and being honest about what we indeed do value, we can get stuck.

As an artist, yes I would love to sell more of my work. I would like to show my work more widely, and I would like more people showing up who enjoy it. But I also know that I want to find for myself a new level of imagery unaffected by the opinions of others. I know that if my work delights me, there will be others who also find it delightful, fun, healing, and want to have it in their home. I don’t care about what the art world says, or what some critic says, or what is in style now.

I also know that some people will not like it, some may even hate it, some will find it uninteresting. This is as it should be! None of us is liked by everyone, art isn’t a popularity contest. However, social media has often become one, and so I’ve been taking some space from all of it, finding a new way to work this for myself.

I delight in finding new to me work by other artists, learning new techniques, and as we clairvoyants say, finding my new pictures about how I want to show my work. So to that end, I’ve been researching framing, ways of working with glazes and color layers, using mediums I’ve not worked with much, and generally playing.

I paint because I must, because I love it, because color is one of my favorite ways to play. I’m reminding myself now of the ‘playing’ part of making art.