It's Right in Front of You
Last fall I was feeling uncomfortable with my art. If you follow my Instagram, you know this is a pretty regular occurrence. But the discomfort was lining up with something new this time - a message that I was seeing again and again from artists I respect, podcasts I listen to, and books I was reading.
You don't just like the things you like. You like them for a reason. Stop ignoring what you're drawn to.
While some of my interests make it into my artwork, at the time…the vast majority of them were pushed aside because:
I had to pick one thing. I needed to focus.
Doing x, y, z, would require a new set of skills.
I'm so flighty as it is, if I start down another path I might never circle back around and then everything I've done will be for nothing.
Well, if something's not working then it's not working, and you can either keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result or try something new. And after at least a year of feeling like my art wasn't moving in a direction that made me happy, I decided to shush those voices that told me to ignore the whispers of enchantment.
I was mulling all this over, and looking down at the sidewalk on my way to pick up my kiddo from preschool, when I was struck by the prints that the fall leaves had left on the concrete.
I found them stunning. And I started thinking about how I've always wanted to incorporate the prints of leaves and flowers in my work somehow. It was a fascination that kept drawing my eyes down to the ground, and consistently pulling my attention to artists who were making use of natural prints in their own work.
No joke, it really did hit me all at once. Here was something that I loved, that had tried cropping up in my work time and again, and which I was attracted to in others' art, but which I was ultimately always trying to shove aside because I had some twisted belief that it was a detour.
I don't believe I even made a firm promise to myself to honor these interests going forward. It was more like a quiet, half-hearted "Okay, okay, I see. Let's try it."
How can I immortalize the essence of a dying thing?
This became the question that has been a pillar of the work that I'm currently immersed in. It has been a relief and a revelation to start giving credit to those interests and inklings.
I found that I wasn't just captivated by spiderwebs. But lace on dresses. And lace-like motifs in other artists' works. And the rainbow of colors in opal, and labradorite, and I mean rainbows in general. Why were these being relegated to things I was only allowed to appreciate? Each time a new undeniable obsession came up, the instinct was to kick it down.
"No, there's no place in my work for this. I don't have room."
…ridiculous. There's always room where there are no boundaries. Creativity can (and does) thrive in an environment of constraints, but first, I think, it has to flourish in limitless potential.
It remains to be seen whether leaning into these infatuations has moved the needle on my artwork, but it certainly feels different. More fun. More exciting. If you’d like to see my new collection of work, “Dreams of Winter’s Dead,” once it’s ready to be released, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter list below.