It's been a long time since I've kept an art journal and actually worked on developing an idea artistically. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with making art, love using it as a form of expression and for dealing with emotional issues but hate the selfishness and what I see as the uselessness of it (My art sits in the attic collecting dust) I also get caught up in thoughts like, is it any good? it's not important art, or the stuff that I do make that I think is important isnt seen by anyone so whats the point!? There are a million other questions and problems with my relationship with art and in particular my art. I'm not a big fan of the art world either, I think I've written about that before.
Having said that I'm just starting to realise that it doesn't have to be for anyone else. It doesn't have to hang in a gallery. I don't have to be working towards being a 'professional' artist, just being an 'artist' 'artmaker' is fine. This argument works for more personal works but sometimes I want to make art about bigger issues, personal but also related to something bigger, then being just an artmaker or artists for my own sake doesnt work, then I need to work towards being a professional artist and getting my stuff out there because it has to reach those who it is trying to speak to. And so I go again chasing my tail!
At the moment I'm just focusing on more personal ideas and so avoiding the issue above. All other ideas that are not of the personal sort are being filtered out until I can sort out the top dilema.
Here is some work that is in my visual diary at the moment. It's been inspired by a book called Women who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I see so much of myself in what she writes. I think I will need to read the book a few times to get all the information and advice out of it. So many of the problems facing women that she talks about relate to myself. The work is not only inspired by the ideas in the book, making art again in general has been inspired by this book. I recommed it to any woman of any age! It is like a bible for women.
Anyway I will share a few photos of some of my work that is happening at the moment.
This is a watercolour that is of a friend of mine, Bell. It's not meant to be a likeness of her but it has her red hair, and I was thinking of her when making it. I will pass on my book or buy one for her when I return home. I drew the wolf part as a mask with visible stitches because I think we have to work to make our connection with the wolf woman within us. So we stitch, we cut, we mold we do what we have to with our minds and hands to make ourselfs in the wolf woman's likeness.
Here I just played around with a drawing I made using Adobe photoshop, getting back to my old art days where I did a fair bit of image manipulation type art.
I want to make this work again, and to not forget or cut off my 'art making' life. I will need support though and I feel finding it will be just as important as making art.
This image of a woman/infant growing within an woman came about from an image I had when thinking about how much I miss my mother and how much I wish I could just curl up in her arms. The image and idea developed from that feeling into something that is not only about missing my mother but also about missing my conection to mother earth and nature in general. The woman inside could also be a new idea or project that is evolving and growing inside the woman's psyche. The hair is deliberately drawn to look like flowing water as well as hair. In some stories hair represents power. Water is symbolic of emotions. The women's hair is tangled to form a kind of umbilical cord. They nourish each other.
I have reworked the original image using photoshop making it look like a wood cut or lino cut, something I might like to turn it into in the future. Red is for blood, growth, blue is for watery emotions. It's a silvery blue so it also connects it to the moon, and the moon godesses knowing and power.
