Chasing my Muse

My muse seems to be playing hide and seek. I am tinkering around the studio, finishing a painted box for a a surprise gift, wrestling with thin paper lining and curing all ills with gold gesso. There is finishing work going on with a canvas piece. Ideas jump up, I paint wildly, then settle back to figure out what happens next. Sometimes painting is more like a Sherlock Holmes adventure where the plot just twists and turns, but follows some sort of wild logic..or a wild Muse. I am rooting through my pile of collage materials searching for the next clue.

In the meantime, I have found that one of the best ways to court the Muse is to prepare for her arrival. I used to rent studio time at an artist's printing studio in Santa Fe. Open studio sessions were a shared event with a dozen or so artists working during a scheduled time slot. This meant you had to create your plate for the printers to run in a certain amount of time...usually early...very early on a Saturday morning...after driving for an hour down a switchback road from the top of a mountain. I am framing out a slightly stressed situation and many of the artists complained that it was very hard to just sit down and start painting...or drawing or doing whatever process...it was mostly monoprinting on plexiglass sheets.

My answer to the situation..and an answer was needed because of the cost of the studio time as well as the time issues....was to spend Friday afternoon and evening creating color swatches and combinations in my sketchbook, full size cartoon drawings for subject matter and a few long searches through art history books and my own sketchbooks for inspiration. when I hit the studio on Saturday morning, fully charged on blue corn pancakes or sopapillas, I began mixing my colors, transferring sketches and creating base drawings. The surprise to all of this very carefully planned process was that half of it went out the window as I worked. I would become inspired by the very process itself and new ideas would flow into my artwork. Color stories changed, imagery evolved and very often I left with images only vaguely related to whatever I had started out with. It was pure bliss !!!!! The muse and I danced a great tango and I have to admit I sold almost every print I ever made in that studio.

So I spent a good part of this week-end cutting paper to size, mounting sheets to mat board and gessoing madly. I pulled the jars and tubes of paint that would be my palette. Once I looked through my sketches and notes, I really warmed to the process and began to find all sorts of possibilities. Suddenly I am quite sure the Muse is arranging an appointment with me and the famous admonishment to follow your bliss opens up before me.

Happy Painting.