Where is my imagination?
It's odd but I realize that my visual imagination has not had a lot of exercise in my life to date. Now that I'm actually thinking about painting and creating a picture completely from within me, I find that I'm almost paralyzed with not indecision, but a lack of ideas. I keep looking at pictures online to find something to paint.
It was only a day or two ago that I realized that I can paint things that don't exist out there. I asked myself what would I paint as a thought or message. A feeling that I can give to others in my paintings. This is a new thought and one that I was not anticipating for some reason.
I'm amazed when I watch someone like Trujillo paint. He moves with quickness and fluidity towards a goal that I'm unaware of. At first I thought, he's got a photo off-screen that he using for the picture. But that's not it. He has a picture in his head he's using and that's what I can't understand.
Right now I'm not a painter or an artist, I'm a copyist, and not a very good one at that. When I can express my thought in a painting, then I will start to change into onto something more like an artist. What I've been starting to understand about the technical aspects of painting, those are just the details of craft. The tools I might need IF I ever get to the point where I use paint to express myself.
This understanding underlies all my deficiencies when it comes to creativity. I lack originality and more importantly, the understanding of what originality is. That's how it was with music, writing, painting, even that stuff with the nerve blocks. I approach all of these ventures as exercises in problem-solving. I've treated imagination as a toy and a plaything. Something to amuse myself with when I have a moment. Not as a guide for expression. That is what must change. I need to turn it loose.
Even as I wrote the lines above this, I was seeing the change that needed to happen as work, something with stages, some ordeal like taking ring across a dangerous land to a volcano for disposal. In other words, a problem to be solved. It's my approach to everything. That must change. I need to change my life to one not centered around the goal of problem problem-solving.
The problem is, I'm pretty good at solving problems. But that's counter-productive for this kind of creativity. I'm free now and I need to act like it. Every night I go to bed, worrying that I didn't accomplish enough that day. I constantly fail to solve enough problems during the day. I don't get up early enough, and I don't get right to the list of things I need to do.
I worry about the past and I worry about the future and the fact is, that past is over and future is whatever happens and most of it is out of my hands. If I ever want to be creative, this is it. Fish or cut bait. This should not be work, it should be fun, liberating.
So let's see what happens. As I lay in bed last night I thought about things I could use as a point of departure for painting. What came to mind was the ultrasound pictures I've drawing for the past 12 years. Start there. I thought about doing the cancellous bone pattern or the whole block. Now admittedly, most people probably won't appreciate them but that is the point, maybe. I don't have to knock them out like a machine and I shouldn't worry what people say. Maybe someone will get it.
Besides right now I'm looking for color. Color. The world is a carousel of color. Wonderful, magical color.
More later,
It was only a day or two ago that I realized that I can paint things that don't exist out there. I asked myself what would I paint as a thought or message. A feeling that I can give to others in my paintings. This is a new thought and one that I was not anticipating for some reason.
I'm amazed when I watch someone like Trujillo paint. He moves with quickness and fluidity towards a goal that I'm unaware of. At first I thought, he's got a photo off-screen that he using for the picture. But that's not it. He has a picture in his head he's using and that's what I can't understand.
Right now I'm not a painter or an artist, I'm a copyist, and not a very good one at that. When I can express my thought in a painting, then I will start to change into onto something more like an artist. What I've been starting to understand about the technical aspects of painting, those are just the details of craft. The tools I might need IF I ever get to the point where I use paint to express myself.
This understanding underlies all my deficiencies when it comes to creativity. I lack originality and more importantly, the understanding of what originality is. That's how it was with music, writing, painting, even that stuff with the nerve blocks. I approach all of these ventures as exercises in problem-solving. I've treated imagination as a toy and a plaything. Something to amuse myself with when I have a moment. Not as a guide for expression. That is what must change. I need to turn it loose.
Even as I wrote the lines above this, I was seeing the change that needed to happen as work, something with stages, some ordeal like taking ring across a dangerous land to a volcano for disposal. In other words, a problem to be solved. It's my approach to everything. That must change. I need to change my life to one not centered around the goal of problem problem-solving.
The problem is, I'm pretty good at solving problems. But that's counter-productive for this kind of creativity. I'm free now and I need to act like it. Every night I go to bed, worrying that I didn't accomplish enough that day. I constantly fail to solve enough problems during the day. I don't get up early enough, and I don't get right to the list of things I need to do.
I worry about the past and I worry about the future and the fact is, that past is over and future is whatever happens and most of it is out of my hands. If I ever want to be creative, this is it. Fish or cut bait. This should not be work, it should be fun, liberating.
So let's see what happens. As I lay in bed last night I thought about things I could use as a point of departure for painting. What came to mind was the ultrasound pictures I've drawing for the past 12 years. Start there. I thought about doing the cancellous bone pattern or the whole block. Now admittedly, most people probably won't appreciate them but that is the point, maybe. I don't have to knock them out like a machine and I shouldn't worry what people say. Maybe someone will get it.
Besides right now I'm looking for color. Color. The world is a carousel of color. Wonderful, magical color.
More later,
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