Doubt

A secret: It is not like every day is a great art making day. There are the doubtFUL days. They have scattered themselves throughout this project. It starts with nasty internal voices whispering and builds into a harsh cacophony: “You’ve run out of ideas;” “You don’t have enough work;” “This isn’t real art;”  “No one will come to your show;”  “You are a fraud;”  “Just who do you think you are;” “Get a real job.” Then there is the 2AM shift: “There is no way you can make a whole show’s worth of work in 2 months (1.5 months, 1 month, 3 weeks, 2 weeks, tick, tick, tick. . . ).”

These voices are old friends who have been with me for a long, long time. There have been chunks of life when I’ve let them run the show. They have had me gripped by panicked night horrors; curled into a fetal ball on the couch; or staring blankly at the corner of a room in a numb daze. I’ve been to therapy, done meditation, taken Prozac and prayed, let alone tried getting wasted in a variety of flavours. Somehow I’ve come through the worst of all this. Now these doubts only own me for shorter and shorter periods of time.

That’s where the pressure of a show’s deadline comes in. Sometimes, now, when one of these voices tries to make itself heard, I feel like a fed-up parent dealing with a truculent child. I sigh and say, “I’m busy. I don’t have time to indulge self-doubt.”

Lemon cake, champagne, milk chocolate & almond covered toffee, or not getting out of my pajamas until noon are my usual indulgences. Self-doubt isn’t an obvious candidate for this list. But, when I’m in my clearest moments, I know it belongs there. It is related to victim mentality – something that took me years to understand was actually a choice. (“Poor little me; I’m a helpless blob.” I don’t think so.)

The Latin roots of the word “confidence” boil down to ‘con’ and ‘fides” – with faith. Now I have more faith that I can make my art.

Why Trees?

You probably thought that I had committed myself to faces, that I was Diana Meredith, portrait artist. I’ve sometimes thought that myself. I like making faces, but for my current project where I am mixing acrylic paint and digital media, I wanted a different image.

Trees in summer are surprisingly hard to depict. They are so big and so amorphous. But our northern hemisphere trees in winter are simplified. I love that that great big form can be defined by all those negative shapes - the diamonds, triangles, rounded pentagons and weird twisty shapes that have no names. When I was in art school we had to do an exercise where we drew a tree by drawing its negative shapes. I sat in Queen’s Park and drew a small tree that forked from the moment it came out of the ground. I was amazed that defining the negative space produced the positive. For months afterwards I walked around looking at the spaces between objects, people, and moments.

Many years ago I saw a painting by Toronto artist, Lynn Hutchinson, that depicted the Tree of Life - a very stylized tree filled with birds, fruit, abundance and beauty. Somehow this image has stayed with me. I wanted to make my own Tree of Life.

Wikipedia and some knowledge gleaned along the way tells me that the image of a sacred tree has been central to many mythologies, religions and stories in lots of cultures. Norse mythology has the Yggdrasil at its center.  This is the World Tree that connects heaven, Earth and the underworld. What about the Buddha sitting under a Bodhi tree?  My mother always told me there were three sacred trees of Ireland - the Rowan, the Hazel and the Mountain Ash. Let’s not forget the garden of Eden, let alone Avatar. Trees should be central to our consciousness – they process all that essential oxygen for us.

The more I try and capture the essence of Tree, the more I’m struck by the large presence they hold. Giants that hold space with grace and without argument; those deep, invisible roots and the aliveness in the space underneath. There is a magic I want to get at.

As I make my Trees of Life, I’m struck with how full of joy, energy and presence they are. So that is a scary subject to address. For years my brother has told me that my images are full of anguish. And for a long time Anguish and Pain seemed like very important topics. The world has too many pretty pictures and it didn’t want to look at the icky side of life. I felt I was a serious artist if I was making images that depicted pain. But now in this patch of middle age it seems to me that joy is a much more daring subject to address.  Not superficial pretty, you understand. Joy that drills down, joy that strips away. Joy that is essence, wonder and connection.

Even as the body ages, or maybe because of it, I am making my own Tree of Life because my life feels very full of joy, connection and presence. That’s a gift.

Organized Chaos

My recipe for interesting image making requires both a cup of chaos and an equal measure of organization. I’m not talking the organization of the material world - the printer isn’t about to run out of ink, there are paper towels, there are enough empty shelves on which to dry gesso covered substrate and the files are backed up on the computer. I’m talking about the image making itself. Planning, fore-thought - that  kind of organization.  You have to do a certain amount of problem defining and planning - my focal point is at too equal a value with the background; I’m going to lighten the background so that the focal point can be seen better. This area in the image is boring - how can I make it more lively? At the same time the chaos is needed for new ideas and new approaches  to problems. If there isn’t a component of chaos  and risk taking, you just solve the visual problems the same way each time. But if you have too much chaos, then. . .  well you know what happens: a big, disorganized mess.

So this idea of organized chaos has been with me for a long time. It is really how I organize both my living and my work spaces. I like to have a contained area, usually a table top or shelf or drawer which is always in a state of chaos. There can’t always be a place for everything because activities are in flux. I pull out a book about Klimt and stack it beside my colour tests and they are piled on top of my acrylic inks which are balanced precariously on the rolls of masking tape. This is the current chaos. As the project unfolds, the chaos increases. But, I contain it. Keep it to one area and keep everything else orderly.

How organized chaos plays out between digital and analog is very interesting. I can be much more chaotic (read: risk-taking, daring, but also unfocused & vague) in digital than in analog. Of course there is no Undo button in analog. I paint, then print, then paint again. That second go of painting needs to be done very carefully or I mess up the printed part. I need to see and define the problems more clearly. At the same time, my years of digital experience come into play. I want to desaturate that area of the image - how do I do that with paint without darkening the image?  In digital the elements of design can all be separated from one another more easily than in analog. I can change the value of a colour without changing the colour itself. In analog my intent has to be clearer. What I like about working in both is that I bring lessons back and forth from one to the other.