Fugue #7, ©2011 Caroline Roberts
I came across this quote in Letters to a Young Artist:
Synthesize, Synthesize, Synthesize. Force relationships between forms that may seem incompatible. If they fuse, maybe you’ve found something fresh. This procedure should be carried out with the methodical precision of a chemical engineer.
Kerry James Marshall
And this is just what I intend to do.
Chickens by river seal on Flickr
It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that there have been only tumbleweeds around here lately. I stopped posting abruptly back in the Spring because I was drowning in stress. Everything that was not essential was eliminated.
The stress wasn’t even any of the classic biggies – no illness, no death, no major changes – it was just too many stressors, too many major commitments. Well, and maybe one biggie that is never on the lists: facing the limitations and restrictions of my own personality.
The accumulating stress caused chronic insomnia – I didn’t get more than 6 hours of very broken sleep from April to June. Some nights I slept as little as one hour and somehow functioned the next day. Adrenaline is a crazy thing!
After I eliminated the external stress sources I went right back to sleeping (being able to dream again made me so happy!) and finally I’m looking around at all the non-essential but FUN things I dropped. I struggle with writing blog entries (if I could only mind-map or draw each one and post it like that!) but the results are so often worth the struggle. Not everyone I meet in my daily life likes to talk about art, paint, light, and color.
Which all leads to my point (really, it does!): I just read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project for about the third time. There are lots of things I take from this book but the one that pushed me to the keyboard this morning is this: Be Caroline. For months I have argued myself in circles about the point of my blog – what niche does it fill, what do I want to write about? – but I could not choose just one. And I come to the conclusion that since I often wander off down rabbit holes of curiosity, then so will my blog. Since I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to get myself organized, stay on track and generally keep chaos from messing with my studio practice, then I will write about that too. I like focused blogs but I am not a single focus person. However, I promise not to muse about the contents of my sock drawer or what we had for dinner or my kids report cards (not that these things can’t be interesting, but they are not me), and I will try to stay somewhat close to the studio.
I can promise that works in progress and my studio practice, or the books I read and the images I see will definitely appear, and they will have no discernable order or pattern. Just like me really.
Central Park in Winter
Half way through any project/task/life ambition, I lose all that initial enthusiasm, look back and see how far I’ve come, and instead of feeling elated I just feel tired.
And it’s not just me: look at all the construction projects where the punch list drags on and on and on. Or the diets that were started in January and abandoned by February.
So what can we do about it? I think the sagging, wilting feeling is inevitable. Perhaps the only thing to do is to take a breath and start again, as if from scratch. Maybe even reconfirm, or redefine, the plan. Or at least pull out the plan and have a look at it.
That’s where I’m going to start and I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime if you have some suggestions for getting through the dip I would love to hear them!
P.S. Does everyone get post-exhibition blues?
The Carlos Cruz-Diez retrospective, Color in Space and Time, opens tomorrow, February 6th, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition was curated by Mari Carmen Ramirez, MFAH Wortham curator of Latin American art, and encompasses Cruz-Diez’ entire career, from realistic paintings from the 1940s, to Physichromies from the last few years. It includes…
Through my visits to Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, I have been introduced to the work of Elias Crespin, in particular Tetra Circular Azul (shown above). The squares appear to float and move in space without support; tilting and moving they change configuration, sometimes all together, sometimes…
Art Project (which was launched yesterday) is a resource for examining high (and I really mean HIGH) definition photographs of paintings. The selection of museums and artworks is limited for now, with very little works past 1914 shown, except from the Museum Kampa, Prague. However, it is still wonderful to be able to examine the brushstrokes…
Onion Skin ©2010 Caroline S Roberts As many of you know, I have an ongoing theme of transparency and shadows. I also have a tendency to amuse my family (or drive them crazy) by taking photographs of the strangest things. Photographs, for me, are a form of sketching. They allow me to study light more…
Studio, Jan 15th When a painting needs a little maturation time, or I find myself between paintings, a studio tidy-up usually helps. When I’m working on a painting the surfaces get more and more chaotic as I rush to dive back into the work. Eventually my work slows down because the surfaces are unclear and,…
Release! by Destinys Agent, on Flickr Now announcing (drumroll please) the year of… Release and Reconnect Yes, I know. TWO words. That would be cheating if these things had rules. Up to yesterday I had just the one word, release, that seemed so right for the simplifying I need to continue. What happened? On impulse…
Color mix swatches For Untitled #5 I set myself the challenge of working in a high intensity red range. Partly because I want to see what effect the color and intensity change has on the transparent veils I paint, but also because red is not my favorite color to use. It’s good to shake things…
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