I like to work in sort of structured bits of time, I think. And I’m always, I’m always tinkering with it when it’s no longer working I try to, I try to mix it up. So for instance I used to always walk out the door with my son at about 7:20 and walk to my studio and sit down and write there when I got there.
Now I’m trying other places to write but I do definitely believe in having time be a part of the processes. So I know if I leave it too open-ended my work can get kind of diffuse if I give myself my own little pressure to get things done even within a single day, even within half of a morning, it focuses me a little bit I think.
I have lots of, lots of built in time to reflect otherwise known as many cups of coffee and I do stop, I put my — what I’m working on down, put my brush down and just sit and drink a cup of coffee. One thing that I have tried to teach myself, I think I’ve learned over the years but I always forget is that, is to keep the creative part of me and the critical part of me separated.
To — so that when I’m working I just let it — I just try to work and I try to shut up the critical part. That part of me can have his say maybe the next day or maybe a week hence, because otherwise the critical part is always there whispering over the creative part of me saying this no good, this is awful, stop, break your paint brushes just give it up and I think that’s always just natural and it may come out of insecurity or worry or too many voices in my head about how things are going, what I’m trying to do.
It’s still a mystery to me how to get the, to get the right, the right atmosphere for me to work. And it’s partly because the way I work is fairly immediate. I like to use materials that are — once they’re on the page they cannot come off the page and they can’t really be covered because — unless that’s part of what I’m going for in the end.
That is — I use many different kinds of water color and those always — those are always going to be layers to some degree and the image is created by the light that is coming up from the paper through the paint instead of bouncing off the top most layer of paint, which is the case in oils or acrylics, opaque paints.
So you have to kind of have to paint from the bottom up so I never quite know if it’s going to work until the very end and it can go very wrong after a lot of work, of course I like that but it also makes me nervous all the time. Yeah.
