I’ve been struggling with creativity lately. Something is blocking not the ideas but the execution. Self-doubt.
I wrote a poem about index cards last month. One of its lines:
when the index cards come out my unease loses a little bit of its doubt
Last week I wrote about art (poetry). For the 17 years before I started writing and painting, I mostly studied studied other people’s art, thought about other people’s art, and wrote about other people’s art. I learned so much.
Waggin Master’s blog reminded me of the verse from the Bible:
If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
Last year, the firm brought in consultants to tell us that when we forget ourselves doing our hobbies we are being truly authentic, which I do not believe is corporate double-speak.
I am working on a group of poems, seven to be exact, for something outside of 1874. It feels uncomfortable to hold onto them and not show them to anyone. Yet. It hurts a little. It aches a bit under my ribcage towards my collarbone.
When my insides match my outsides is when my eye is single, when I am authentic. It has always been a struggle for me, this. Lately, I do what I don’t want to do when there is no necessity of doing it. It’s me living my shadow life. In the shadows all kinds of thing flourish/decay.
Yesterday, I forced myself to pick up a project I’d planned a few weeks earlier. I had been inspired by Joel Sartore’s photograph of an endangered Malayan tiger at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. I used my new coldwater compressed paper, black sharpie, black ballpoint pen and a new white pastel from my son’s set as I’m running out.
I think I love painting animals.
Exhibition 1874 