Feeling Potential, Making it Real
Building an art practice is building myself.
These paintings came after a year spent forming my own consulting business and volunteering on a two-acre farm near my home in DC. I was looking for ways to build outside of institutional systems and to support and be in community with others doing the same. I wanted to have my hands in the dirt.
Starting again is hard and uncomfortable, but the alternative – not practicing what I am called to do – feels like not fulfilling my potential. When I am not creating (or attempting to), I have a nagging feeling like I’ve been neglecting something I’m on the hook for. Even then, I think being an “artist” is really about seeing, about paying attention. Whether or not I am consciously aware of it, I am always taking in language and images, absorbing, processing, connecting the ideas and patterns swirling around me. If I give it time and attention, eventually a direction will start to emerge.
There is something delicious about getting lost in a process of my own creation. It usually feels like a mess at the beginning. I wade around, mining the archive of notebooks, sketches, saved files, photos that have been accumulating for months, often years - fragments that could go in a thousand different directions. What is forming is more of a vague idea, blurred around the edges, than a clear vision. If I keep going, at some point I will discover what is trying to be made, and then things will happen all at once. I’ll find moments of a flow state, the best part of all. And eventually I will have made something where nothing existed before.
This is a slow process, but one of the beauties of making art is that it can take the time it takes. I used to think my work needed to be “done” to share. Now I think this idea of completeness is a fallacy. It is in the making that new portals emerge. Walking through one door opens another; using up one good idea unearths five more. And while the work is my own, creation happens in community. Without a generous community of artists and friends to react, critique, and hold space for each other to expand and grow, I probably wouldn’t get much further than digging around in the metaphorical dirt.
There’s nothing wrong with dirt! But there is something deeply satisfying about finally turning an idea or a feeling into tangible work. The finished product is rarely what I envisioned, but it is made real, for the moment at least.
