Fun with abstract painting: mark making, textures, and more stories.
Fun with abstract painting: mark making, textures, and more stories.
My adventurous spirit gets a good workout this week. Overthinking just gets in the way of finding the magic in a painting.
Hello my friends and readers! This week’s post features my new paintings, and a post about finding the magic in the art making process. Hint: release the perfection and overthinking, which is easier said than done at times, but entirely doable. Read on for more.
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Love, Kris
My adventurous spirit gets a good workout this week: overthinking just gets in the way of finding the magic in a painting.
When I get to the point in a series of paintings where the mark making, colors, and energy of what’s happening on my canvas feels like magic to me, I want to celebrate.
It’s the most fun ever to find my way and allow the painting to come forward and exist, in real time. I can’t force this, analyze it, or overthink my way into having it. I have to show up and do the work, and some days it’s here for me. Other days, I feel like I’m wading through the dark tangled forest, muddy ugly colors, uninspired imagery, and too much thinking.
Overthinking will definitely kill the magic. Trying to make sense of what shows up will explain it away. This is true in art making, it’s true in giving a clairvoyant reading, and it’s true in life.
Trust in oneself, in the process, in spirit, is the key. It’s also one of the hardest things to have at times. From my own experience, I know that I’ll go right into effort about doing something if I forget to play, or I need it to be perfect, or I get stuck in thinking it has to go a certain way or it won’t be good.
Poppycock! Balderdash! What a load of codswallop! While I’m at it, horsefeathers too!
^This kind of silliness^ keeps me amused and helps me find the magic when I’ve lost sight of it. In my opinion, it’s good to have access to an inner clown and be prepared to bring it out at will. Red nose, big shoes, clown car and all the accoutrement.
More to the point I’m making, it helps me get down off the perfection pedestal. Yikes, once that monument to perfect goes up in my art yard, I’m lost. I have to get back to the playground, to the experimenting, the what ifs, the I wonder what would happens?
And so today I celebrate because I have found my way to the paintings I’ve been wanting to get to since last year, when I started making hand painted bookmarks, and wondered about making paintings that were as free as they were. I made dozens of bookmarks last year, gave a bunch as gifts around the holidays, and sold some too. The small size inspired me, because it was fast, simple, and easy, and I had a lot of permission to play. This exercise was all about experimenting, and it worked. I was surprised at how much I learned about painting - mark making, using glazes and mixing colors, from making these little painted paper bookmarks.
There’s about a dozen of them tucked away into books in my house, and it gives me so much pleasure to come across one I forgot about, a little pop of color and fun in my day.
This week the adventure continues as I begin several new pieces along similar themes as the ones I’m sharing with you today. The trick is to get them started and get out of my own way while having fun painting.
Here are two more new paintings, and a video of one.
New podcast episode
Inspiration for playing with your art
I love this album by Ken Nordine so much, and will share it regularly. Here it is!
Thanks so much for subscribing and reading! Please share this newsletter with anyone you know who would like it, and thank you! Love, Kris