I just spent a few hours fighting the good fight in my squatter studio, spilling and splashing, and desperately trying to revive some paintings still injured from the fire way back in june. These paintings have been sitting in a portfolio smelling slightly smoky and feeling abandoned. I may write some obituaries up, but I also figure if I'm going to fight my big stupid fear every time I have a day off I might as well fight another one and paint. A low level fear of making miserable, pointless things is always present in my studio. Maybe someday I'll manage to get rid of it, but today it served as a pretty good motivator. I paint because I have to, because there is a reason to use these forms, these colors, these ideas in the haphazard way I do but also because I'm be a big liar if I don't paint and because enough people think my work is worth looking at that if I make crap I'm disappointing them as well as myself.
It's no big secret that anxiety motivates artists, it thoroughly did in the nineteenth century, and it seems like the more worried we all are about the world falling apart, the more we run to the studio and try to patch it together again.
OK, so then, more soon I betcha. Take good care and keep on fighting the good fight, comrades,
Rachael