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| The start of an idea. |
I have talked in the past about ways to overcome the artists block that we have all encountered at points.
What about the exact opposite?
What if your head is so full of ideas that the biggest frustration is lack of time? Has this happened to you?
At the moment I have about 5 completely different pieces of work on the go plus about 10 that are on the back burner.
For me some of the most important preparation that I do consists of assembling all the disparate materials before I can do anything. This can be quite time consuming especially when the envisaged piece is quite big and requires several different kinds of object.
It takes me time assimilate exactly what my intention is, in fact sometimes it's someone else who gets where I am heading before I do.
I should add here that the presentation is absolutely key in most of my work. I know exactly how it needs to be framed before I have made the piece.
Here's a good example of what I mean, sorry about the rubbish photograph but it is just to illustrate a point really.
Even as I write I am thinking that I need to probably do a drawing to help clarify my intention. Who knows I might do that, I might not.
What is your process? I am intrigued by how other artists work and which comes first. Please leave a comment about how you start a new piece. Then hopefully the discussion can be continued in further blogs with your input.
Have a great weekend! Be creative!
I find personally that I implement a minute percentage of the ideas that fly through my mind over the course of time. And when I say fly I really mean that. Creative ideas and inspiration remind me of seagulls flying on the thermals of my cluttered brain. I have to jump and hope to catch some of them before they slide off into the middle distance (maybe to be recalled later) or out over the sea of life never to be seen again. The ones I manage to catch need then to be landed and subdued enough to record and eventually work on. Too many ideas and half ideas and flashes of inspiration and half remembered ideas have led me to work in a random but structured way now. Of necessity - or I would spend all day staring into space watching the seagulls riding the warm air. I have begun to develop a method that works for me though. I make lots of notes and lots of sketches - small rough unstructured emotional responses to stimuli and then render them in whatever outlet seems appropriate. For painting I find the spontaneity of the way I work too exhausting mentally too paint calmly for long spells and I have to work in small spurts of time and then leave and return; leave and return. With printmaking I am learning that the whole series of processes allow room for staggered spontaneity and that is a great balance to the more edgy side of painting. I cant do the sort of painting that starts in the top corner and works down till you get the opposite corner. I have to work on the whole piece as a whole during the whole of its evolution. Printmaking you can discover and evolve in a much more sedate way but still introducing the elements of 'emotional response'.
ReplyDeleteAs for the thought that too many ideas is as bad as too few I think it is just two sides of the same coin. You have to work and you have to be doing something even if its not the thing that you are most interested in that day.
It took me a while watching the seagulls before I learned you have to actively reach out and fly with them.