Out of a hole

Works in progress 8.18.23

    

    I got around to making some base layers on some new 9" x 12" panels that I purchased recently. These are going to be more pieces that will be included in my "Soft Poems" series that I've been developing. Most feature some iteration of the glyphs, along with other marks, amid translucent layers of matte gel. I'm hoping to make a lot of these and have at least twenty available to show at my next solo exhibition. 

    I wasn't going to come to the studio today. This morning, I was feeling the weight of this week in a real way. It was mostly thinking about mistakes I've made around the business side of my art practice and some things around my work itself, especially some of the newer things that I'm exploring. It's always like this when I'm working in an unfamiliar creative space that I'm also attempting to develop into something more than experiments. The mistakes I referred to was me trying to figure out what to do about the internal dialogue I was allowing to go around in my head. The good thing is that I'm at a point in my life where I'm not comparing what's happening now with how I dealt with similar things years ago. I'm not wallowing in a negativity loop like I used to do in my 20s. I've made great strides with being kinder with myself and better about moving towards solutions. 

    Regardless, as a human being, you'll feel things. It's better to give that stuff a little space and move on, rather than remaining stuck there and not making room for taking steps to remedy whatever bad choices were made in the past. It's hard, sometimes and I have to be intentional about moving myself out of a down space to a less down space in my mind. The "less-down" thing for me to do was to come to the studio, even if it was much later than I would have liked and I wasn't going to have the usual time to be here. I made it work and moved these new pieces forward. The next time i come in, I'll be able to do so much more, now. Making the choice to come here regardless of how I was feeling was the win.

TM