What Influences Your Work?
When I attended my first SAQA Conference, the attendees were asked to submit a slide of their artwork and share what influenced it. I’m guessing we spoke in order by surname, as I was one of the last to share. Artist after artist stood up and said they were influenced by nature. Not me. What drove my art, and continues to drive my art is curiosity. I want to know what happens when … I am always experimenting with new techniques, products, and designs. This can be exhilarating. It can also be exasperating. When it gets to be to much of the latter, I return to working in a way I find exhilarating. Proceeding full speed ahead is how I rest.
Letting Go
The good news is I finished my latest small (10″ x 10″) piece for Cohasset Open Studios. The bad news is I hate it. There may be ways to improve it, but I have lost interest. I can’t be bothered. So, onward and upward. I’m back to working in a size I like, with techniques I find soothing, and based on a subject matter I love. Perhaps I will fix the small work later. Perhaps I will accept it as close enough. Perhaps what is best is to be true to myself and not worry about having things that might sell at Cohasset Open Studios.
A Fresh Beginning
If you have followed my blog over the past few years, you have probably guessed, I’m making my next sunrise quilt. This one is based on yet another photo I had my husband take during our walks. It is titled Sunrise at Minot Beach. Normally, I start work in the upper left hand corner and build work the way you read, from left to right and top to bottom. Not this time. Instead I’m working from the bottom up, but still left to right. The underpinning structure is alternate blocks. Block 1 of 35 blocks is done.
What motivates you to create?
I am linking up with Nina Marie’s Off the Wall Fridays.
I am with you in regards to curiousity!
My father was a mechanical engineer with a career in academics and my husband is a chemical engineer who focused on R & D. For years I didn’t understand our connection. Then it hit me, our fields were very different, but we driven by the same impetus, that need to understand how things work and explore the interactions, and use this knowledge to problem solve. Nice to hear you share our interests.
What motivates me to create? I could say “Nature”…but not really. Not just *any* “nature” or natural phenomena. I am fascinated by skies. (Also trees and fields, but mainly skies.) And then there are the things that I *have* to make because I am told to do so; I have no choice. I refer to those things as “Spirit/Statement” pieces. Usually nothing “natural” involved. The pictures “arrive” and it is my job to put them into reality. That’s it in a nutshell. 🙂
What is the fascination with skies that you, I and others share? Perhaps it is the infinite possibilities, with no two skies being similar. Could it be the limitless feeling of no boundary. Currently, I’m looking out at what is called a clear, blue sky. However, there is a subtle glimmer at the horizon, with the blue nearly washed out. The outer perimeter of my vision is significantly darker, a rich shade of peacock blue.
Cheryl Wheeler, a favorite singer song writer of mine, describes what it is like to have a song drop into her head as part of her shtick. Basically, there are times when she is knows better than to interfere with the voice in her head. Everything else looses priority until the song is written.
I believe the key to being an artist, is like you and Cheryl, to listen to our spirit guides even when logic may point us in a different direction.