Bubble Muse

// August 23rd, 2010 // 7 Comments » // creativity, illustration friday

This is my latest Muse piece, my painting style is swinging around like crazy at the moment. I’m experimenting a lot with trying to make my art more enjoyable to make and to look at.

I thought this would make a great Illustration Friday picture–the theme this week is ‘Atmosphere’. When I was painting this, the qualities I wanted the Muse to represent were air and lightness.

I’m preparing for a big art project that involves lots of Muse paintings–this is not quite the look I’m going for but I felt good after finishing this one, I feel like I’m progressing and getting closer to the look I want.

It’s very different from the Gypsy Fire painting, and also from the earlier Muse painting I posted. I’ve only recently switched from Goauche paints on paper to doing acrylic paintings–it feels like a whole new world is opening up for me. My studio is starting to fill up with paintings, some surpisingly good and some total crash-and-burn efforts. I’m learning some great things from the failures though, and they can always be painted over.

I’m doing a lot of thinking, and writing about the creative process and how we get inspiration. When I’m not writing I’m painting, and a part of my mind is tracking what’s going on there as well. The more I keep the idea of muses in my mind, the more real they seem to me. It’s like having a koan ripening inside me, I’m just waiting for all the pieces to come together.

The Air Is Thick With Muses

// August 2nd, 2010 // 8 Comments » // muse

This has been a very Muse-centric month for me.

I’m working on a series of Muse paintings, writing and trying guided meditations for meeting the Muse, and developing a weird sequence of conversations with my Muse/ Muses.

Muse. Muse. Muse.

I have made an executive decision that there isn’t just one Muse, or the meagre nine Muses allotted by the Ancient Greeks. I’ve decided that, in fact, Muses are infinite. There is a muse for everybody, often even more than one. The air is thick with Muses.

This fact may take a while to trickle down to Wikipedia but until then I’m just going with it. While I wait I may amuse myself by coming up with a fun collective noun for Muses. (A shiver of Muses? A thrill? A flutter?)

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The image at the top of the post is a painting I finished last week called ‘Meadow Muse’. It’s a prototype for a ‘project’ that is coming in the next few weeks.

As a prototype this is, in one sense, a total failure. Because the look of the paintings that follow it is very different–much brighter, more dynamic.

But I still like this one, it’s a just more of a Victorian Romantic version of the Muse than where I want to end up.

My default emotional setting is melancholy, and I think this painting was a way of getting past that in order to access the more vibrant paintings that are on their way.

I still really like that melancholy part of me and the art that comes from there, but creativity is about exploring new directions too, and I’m excited to access different parts of me and discover the kind of art that’s waiting to arrive.

I don’t feel like I’ll be losing what the melancholy side offers, either. I’ll always have that to draw on, and it’ll show up here and there no matter what I do, anyway.

I want these paintings to be dynamic and inspirational. I want to inspire other people with my paintings and be inspired myself. I want the paintings to be bright and boisterous and busy, because that’s what I want for myself. That’s the kind of Muse I want to invoke.

And if I’m being called to do paintings of Muses, then it seems wrong for them not to be invocations.

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That doesn’t mean I don’t like this particular painting, I like all my paintings. Even if everyone in the whole world hated a painting of mine, I would still love it. Even if it sucked.

I’ve done many, many paintings that sucked and I still love them.

Even though the physical action of painting means covering a canvas with paint, for me it still has the quality of uncovering something that was always there. I believe every object or being that I paint, or draw, every character who arrives in one of my poems, has some kind of a life, a life that was always there, waiting to be uncovered. I have no reason to believe that, but I do.

None of that makes any sense to me when I see it in words, but it makes sense whenever I have a brush, or a pencil, in my hand.

*****

As I was looking at this painting the other day, and thinking about the title ‘Meadow Muse’ and what was going in in the painting, it struck me that the Muse could be the woman writing from her pot of golden ink, or could just as likely be the hummingbird at her ear, or could even be the charged space between them.

It was like seeing one of those young woman/old woman optical illusion drawings. I got a small shiver and ideas started pouring in for the current paintings I’m working on.

That’s something I love about the creative process–the way snippets of ideas organically emerge, little magical details that will never show up in the rational part of my mind. Mostly because my rational mind is busy, with it’s head down, peering through horn-rimmed glasses at a Very Important clip-board.

And as everyone knows, there’s no place on a Very Important clipboard for anything written in crayon, glitter-glue, or finger-paints, and especially not for anything whispered in the ear by a ‘Muse.’

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I would love to hear about your experience with the concept of the Muse. What is your relationship with your Muse like? Do you have more than one? Do you have any suggestions for a collective noun for Muses?

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Cloud doodle + poem = blog post

// July 19th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // doodle, muse, poetry