Kickstarting

What a busy few weeks this has been.  My intent is to blog weekly, however,  I had no opportunity last week.  I am getting ready for ArtFest in April and will write more about this next time.  This past weekend I attended a workshop given by Adria Arch, an artist I wrote about in an earlier post.  The topic was about how to move forward when you are stuck.  It was an intense and useful workshop. What I came away with (yet again) is that I need to relax more into my work and be present with it instead of trying to produce a finished product.  I don't know that I will ever be totally free from that inner voice that prompts me to be the best, do the best, etc. but I certainly was able to do this by the end of the weekend.  One of the exercises was to do a series and make up rules about the series.  So, my rules were: 1) Use black in each piece because I rarely use black 2) Each piece had to have a circle and a curved line 3) As the work evolved, a new rule was to add a turquoise line 4) Each piece would have red dot in a bottom corner.  Simple.  And it was!  I produced six pieces in two and a half hours and did not feel stuck at all.  In fact, it freed me and I found this very counter intuitive.  I moved quickly from piece to piece, then would go back into a piece and add something, a color, a line that felt right.  It was great fun.  Although I am an intuitive painter, I also like structure and this provided both for me.  What is most important, and the theme for the workshop, is that I shut down the critic in my head.  It was a very interesting exercise.