I created a second Facebook page for Lisa Klow Artist. There's nothing on it yet, but maybe if a lot of people 'Like' it I'll post some pictures.
I'm still going through a lot of mental housecleaning. I'm reading Martha Beck's Steering by Starlight and it takes everything I learned in Four Day Win and kicks it up several notches. I'm cleaning out the attic so to speak. I realized everything I'm doing has been wrong.
But instead of panicking I'm feeling relieved, like I just set down a heavy sack of flour I didn't realize I'd been carrying around.
I wandered down the wrong path and got really lost. For years. But I'm finding my way back. I put away all the old stuff I've been sorting through. Instead of trying to make sense of my past or trying to somehow - somehow - use these old images in some way...(so I haven't been wasting my time!)... I've put it all away. Some of it is in a paper bag waiting to be burned.
I was thinking recently of Mark Rothko. The Rothko segment of Simon Schama's Power of Art series was my favorite, mainly because Rothko was in his 40s before he hit upon his method of working. Did you know he used to paint figures? Among many other things he tried that didn't quite work. What if he had held onto those ideas, unwilling to let go because he'd been working on them for so long. What if he had refused to let go, insisting there had to be a way to make them work? We never would have had this:
Source
It's hard to admit you've been wasting your time, but continuing to pursue the same thing without results is just running on the Hamster Wheel of Despair (to quote Carolyn Hax from this year's Hootenanny).
So I have packed up the past - jumbled photos, old drawings, sketches, unresolved, unorganized, unanalyzed. Most important, not to be resolved. It's okay to just walk away and not finish something, despite the echo of my father's voice in my head declaring this is failure, tragedy, and the end of the world. Sometimes giving up is the best course of action, the only way to become unstuck.
What's more important is the now, and moving into the future. I'm finally learning what it means to let go.
I either destroyed or put away all the work I've done so far in Suzi Blu's A Lovely Dream workshop. I'm starting over. I'm going to make myself a coptic-sewn journal out of Stonehenge paper. Again. (I made one a couple years ago but I didn't like working in a bound book so I took it apart.) I have to wait for payday to get the paper. However, I have a blank journal from bookmaking class in grad school that I never used.
The paper is Rives, so it's lightweight and very fragile (it pills when erased). But, instead of panicking or declaring failure and ripping it all up, I glued sturdy watercolor paper to the backs of some pages, applied some clear gesso over the drawings, and am moving on.
It's a start.
A fresh start.
