Studio Doings

This is my first real piece of finished mixed media work.  It's 12x12 inches on canvas panel.  The color is way more saturated than I'd hoped, but I am learning a lot about layering paint and paper.  I do love acrylics, all the things you can do with them.  I like the solid, finished quality...although, being acrylic, I could keep working it til the day I die.  But I'm moving on.

I had to show you what's happening with my sansevieria trifasciata (Mother in Law's Tongue).  I've been growing these plants (ancestors of this one) for 40 years and I've never had one bloom before.  There are drops of viscous nectar where the flowers branch from their stem, and the whole affair smells faintly like lilac.  What a treat!

About that weekly challenge I was doing, I've lost the inspiration to keep at it so it will be on hiatus until sometime later.  My energy really has drifted away from quilting -- although I have a stack of fabrics selected for Fiberactions' next challenge (reveal July 15), so perhaps that will get me back into my quilting groove.

It is with some amount of guilt that I realize, yet again, that pretty much once I hit my stride with a particular medium, I begin to drift to something else.  I've talked about aspects of this in earlier posts, so it might sound familiar.  The guilt, I think, is because I invest so much of myself into something -- read: so much money, so little of which I have to begin with -- that I feel as though I haven't gotten my money's worth out of that investment before moving on.

I realize that this is just life.  That there's really no way to measure intrinsic value.  And that the money-for-art-supplies-and-tools conversation isn't justified when one is responding to one's soul, one's muse.  Still, I'm just sayin'...

Last summer ecodyeing was my big project.  I still want/hope to do more, but haven't devoted any energy to it recently.  I have a big stack of beautiful ecodyed fabric, some of which I've used in quilts, some of which I've sold.  I have far more rusted things than I'll ever use, things that I accumulated through the end of last year that I'll probably end up giving away next time I move...like so many other art things from past infatuations.

Obviously I'm still not comfortable with the fact that my artistic interests and desires shift so often.  I'm repeatedly left with a residue of incompletion.  I see this factor operating in other aspects of my life as well -- it's hard to make a clean break with a clear conscience.  I'm always wondering whether I could have done more...

But then life intervenes.

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