direction

I've been thinking about a quote that was given to me on my recent Authentic Artist workshop (with Kath Burlinson), from my teacher Paul Oertel:

Never belabour yourself with creativity.
Follow the juice.
Outsmart yourself by following the fun.
Look for the stream that is open.


I've been waiting for ages for the Indian gods/land project to get moving again, but the truth of it is that it isn't. Yesterday, getting back to work after various social interruptions, I decided to get it started, and worked in my practice on a drawing from an image that I love:

But it just didn't work out. I love these Chidambaram images, and the dance thing is central to my practice and my daily orientation.

But I seem to be forcing it now. These images came, after the Discipline of Freedom workshop in May. But they haven't taken off in the way I was hoping for.

I saw at the end of my last period of working with the mythology  (that beautiful text about the golden egg)

that it had become too intellectual, too theoretical - that what I needed to do was just to work with the words and the images and see what happened when I put them together (instead of trying to work it out in some way...). Perhaps I'll come back to it more naturally at some point in the future.

Perhaps it's medium. I hadn't thought medium could be so powerful. The original dance work was a free kind of painting, but what I did yesterday was heavy, dark charcoal. One part of me was excited by the deep, dark possibilities that seemed to be emerging; all that stuff at the back of my mind and emotions about time, the decay of stone, the life of past sculptors - long dead- coming through time in the form of these weathered, dancing forms. But something about that also started to oppress me. Is it that it's too much about ideas rather than paint/line responses? Or is it that, if I was doing as Paul and Kath suggested - following the fun, looking for the stream that is open - I wouldn't be working with this heavy material right now, however interesting it seems to be to my mind.

If I follow the fun, work with the stream that opens so naturally, I produce work like this:

This is where the stream takes me...

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