Moving into new territory

12 x 16 oil on paper, La Parroquia

San Miguel is a community full of artists and artistic expression.  You see it and feel it in art galleries, in music (in small and large venues), in dance, in festivals that are happening all around all the time, in parades that spring up from seemingly unknowable origins – loud, colorful costumes, energetic, in seventeenth century buildings and modern structures, in los sabores de la vida.  It is in the Aurora Fabrica and in the artisan market.  It is realistic and abstract, trained and self-taught, small and large-enough-to-cover-a-wall.  It is in brightly colored larger-than-life puppets celebrating life and death and … just because.  It is everywhere. 

I continue my paintings on canvass; although since having attended the lecture of Kandinsky, I have been wrestling with my own desire to move beyond my own limits, my own fears of not getting it right, of it “looking pretty.”  I know the part of me that wants to move beyond and the part that keeps things in check, both needed but not letting one dictate everything.

I finished a canvass painting (I will show at another time) and rather than lose the paint still on my palette, I quickly sketched a thought, an image, and then used the paint to just “waste.”  What I found in the process was joy and energy and freedom.  I found myself in a different space and when I was done I found something had shifted for me and left me with more questions about what I was doing.

I continue to paint on canvass but I am also painting on paper – not a particularly good material for oil but on one in which I find I do not have to worry about getting it right – just paint.  I can always throw it away.  (The one posted is one I did yesterday when I found that the canvass I was working on was still wet and need more time to dry before moving on to the next phase.)  What I am experiencing is a certain freedom beyond the canvass.  I love how I feel in the process; I love the color, the freedom, the joy, the uncertainty, the style.  I will see how it goes.

I come back to Kandinsky’s quotes:

 “The true work of art is born for the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation.  It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.”

 “Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”

To move beyond the boundaries that I have placed on myself that keep me from moving into new territory that I makes my heart sing.