Sunday, May 6, 2012

Painting, theory and everything I didn't write

This is another one of those blog posts that are originally supposed to be an update but really is a therapeutic way of channeling built-up frustration, I'm afraid. I've been working hard lately, not so hard that I don't have the potential to work even more (there's always that potential), but I do find myself working on multiple projects and ideas at the same time. The only problem with that is it makes my inner people pleaser come to life and torture me.

Because out of all these projects and ideas, how many have I completed and how many will be completed in the near future? If they actually do get finished, are they any good at all or just ready to be trashed?

When I get an idea, I usually spend a lot of time going over it in my head, making sketches and trying out possibilities. It's when I actually start to work on it that things start to go south - especially when it comes to painting. Because when I paint, the original idea starts to fade and I become more and more eaten up with technical questions and whether the brushstrokes are "correct" or "incorrect" or look the way I want them to look like. Often I have an idea in my head of what I want it to look and this idea overshadows what I want to communicate, and just the fact that I allow it to happen frequently causes my self confidence to plummet. I just have to take a step back and try to understand what I'm actually doing.

I won't pretend that I have the answer to that question yet. Instead I marvel at how painting and theory (idea) become so separated in my head once I start the painting process. It genuinely scares me that I know that if someone asked me casually what I meant by my latest painting I wouldn't be able to answer, because a lot of the preparatory work probably was done by thinking in images or loose strands of half sentences.

 Taking that infamous step back I think that not letting theory or original idea get in the way of the exploration would be the ideal goal - but not an easily obtainable one. There is always that duality in me; one part wants freedom and creativity, whereas the other just wants to be acknowledged and achieve technical brilliance. The theoretical, art historical part of me continues to oscillate between the two and sprinkle whichever project I'm working on with self doubt and insecurities.

Which is why I have posted about similar situations before, and this probably won't be the last time. I had originally intended for this "speech" to be left offline in my own personal archive, but I decided to publish it anyway, hence the second point in the blog post title.

 I seem to "write" in my head continuously. A lot of the time I know very specifically what I want to write about, sometimes I would try to figure it out as I go but not end up writing or publishing anything. Bottom line - I chicken out. I feel the world (the art world in particular) could do without my views, and that the insecurity of not knowing the reactions is enough to keep me from writing altogether.

 I recently thought, where does all this unwritten text end up? Is it heaped somewhere in my mind's external hard drive like a back-up version you don't really need, or is it deleted instantly leaving only faint traces of its existence?

 Of course you could say that the art theoretical/intellectually stimulating side of the text would suffer on behalf of sincerity and whimsical language....I'm working up the courage to not care.