Friday, October 18, 2013

Artist ambitions, and sleeplessness.

Up at 3 am, thinking about the self digesting mushrooms that are sitting on my back porch, maturing into a raw silky ink. I was dreaming of dying some fabric in this medium, when all of a sudden, images of mushrooms spawning from a hand bag came to mind. Oh the woe's of an artist. Scratch using raw ink, I'm not into mobile gardens. I'll cook it before I start painting. Am I the only one laughing? 
Yes..perhaps I am. But it is a rolling, hysterical laugh. I love it. 

I started making a handbag yesterday, amiss the catastrophic state of my home. I should have been doing something more productive, but eating away at me was the drive to create a masterwork of art. With the sewing part done, I resumed my more "time sensitive" duties, and left the hand bag to wait until more time came to finish it. As I slept, I was awakened by the silent sound of inky caps disintegrating on my back porch. No, there really was no sound, just in my imagination. Restless (I have a tenancy to not sleep well on full ambitions) and not able to return to sleep, I motioned towards the place where the mushrooms, ink and all, were awaiting me. They are still there. I contemplate whether to bring the black murky fluid into my house just yet. The cooking process (which stops the decomposition, and kills spores..aka, no mobile garden) is one, in which, brings out the foulness of odor from the ink. Although it will quickly dissipate, I cannot help but wonder if my slumbering husband and children will be wakened by my 3 am madness. Sigh. There is not a lot a person can do on a sleepless night in a home where echoes of the furnace vent from the basement can be heard in the still, quiet air of a fall night. I best just blog for now. 

I am both surprised and amazed at my new found creative re-awakening. A few years back, I had a complete stall. Artist block if you might call it that. The birth of my last child put a u-turn in my personal aspirations. And before that, it had been a year or so since I had spontaneously produced anything truly creative. I feel that, as an artist, one needs to have the urge to create. Mandated genius does not come in a natural form. Self propelled, inspired desire does. I have never been much of a conformist. I have never been able to produce any good art on demand. Consignment is not my thing. My art comes without plans, or an agenda. I cannot even knit because of the confinements of a pattern one must follow. When I sit to work, I simply have a vague idea of how my piece will "feel", and without a clue as to how I will get there, without a draft, I just jump in. As I start, something starts to form. At times it is genius, others end as a meaningless flop. That is the bargain I play. Some spend tedious hours creating pre-sketches, only to replicate the same thing again in the main course. Why? Perhaps I missed something in the art class that I did not attend. But for me, once the sketch is done, so is the fun? I am certainly and in no way mocking those who dedicate such time and focus to their work, I am just a different grain of salt. I cannot fathom following such formalities when it comes to genuinely expelling inspired art.  

I will share with you with a beautiful and inspiring landscape created with none other; the ink-cap.
Beautiful. I find Peter Ward's work fascinating. He is, to say the least, a very skilled artist.
This is one of the very few, and perhaps the best modern ink-cap art that I have come across in my research.
Although the current project I am working on will use the ink-cap as a dye, I am contemplating using it as a paint in the same way Peter did here on this piece. 

 ink-cap landscape (shaggy-ink-cap-ink; pward 1995)





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