Reflections on the process, what I am up to, reading & thinking about.
The last few days my focus has been on making things. Preparing materials for printing, painting! board to be printed. And also I have been feeling the joy! of spring. Did I say that I would be painting that growth & vigour somehow? I did, and I have tried to. I have put myself in a crucible, and it is cooking red hot. The prints will have their “Concluding” show in two weeks. I don’t think I’ll have them all done as the show opens, I will be right in the thick of concluding as those prints hang on the wall. I looked at our garden and saw the beauty and the colour, and I am delighted and I have been sketching the flowers. Flowers. Yes, one of the categories even.
So I will post flowers, this morning’s flowers! But life goes on and other things are on my mind, lots.
I have been reading Robert Hobbs’ book on Lee Krasner, and nothing has touched me quite as much as her story. I will write up more about that soon when I post “1944” a sketch I just did a few moments ago.
So this is a process post, it hangs in here with earlier process posts, like the one where I had the conversation with Peter McCleavy about warring selves. The whole question of variety is on my mind, style, how I have not found my true self. Maybe not, but I see true messy self and complex layers. Here is a quote from Robert Hobbs’ essay, I liked reading that:
In these works, Krasner began what proved to be a long evolutionary process of coming to terms with the theories of Rimbaud, a journey that would eventually lead to a full appreciation of his assertion, “I ended up by finding sacred the disorder of my spirit.”
Page 51
Another realisation. What is the source of inspiration or creativity? The source is not is not just this or that, media (canvas & paint etc.), or the inner world of the artist or nature (Hans Hoffman who taught Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner and I think Diebenkorn thought it was those three). We can add fashion, fame, money, luck, marketing, innovation, charisma, zeitgeist, politics and friendship, it is all in the soup. “Socometric Matrix” is the word I use for it, an ecology, a mix of dynamic forces. While the origin of creativity can be explored, it can’t be fully understood. While there there are a lot of factors at play, much like the factors forming a wave in the sea, it is possible to ride the wave, or to miss it.
They say that the … genius is always ahead of his time. True, but only because he’s so thoroughly of his time.
Henry Miller, Preface to The Subterraneans,
by Jack kerouac, 1959
When I do flowers, they could be anything. Maybe my avoidance of the shadow, my delight in the life force, or both, and they will be about flowers and who knows what else. Often I am conscious of the media, the strokes of the pen right through to the posting on the blog, and there is more that I don’t know about till much later. All of it is moving towards something. I don’t know where it is going, but I have total trust in the process.