Age of Abstraction

It's been a while.  I've dropped the blog in favor of the cheap thrill of posting on Instagram.  There is something (I prefer to think it childlike rather than egomaniac) that in me is still immediately driven to share art after immediately producing it.  It is like it is not real until it has had at least 1 observer outside me.  Or maybe I'm just looking for validation.  Regardless.

Something about doing art before breakfast on a Saturday morning is thrilling to me.  Maybe it's sending a signal that art is more important than food, or just delight in the fact that I have a free morning that I can be driven by aesthetic impulses rather than clock time.

These sketches are done on notebook paper - nothing fancy.  I was complimented that someone reached out to me inquiring about one, but realized I had already marred it by sketching beside it, also it was not done on durable material, also I think you spray oil pastels to seal them, spray which I don't have.

just a weed and its backdrop

The inspiration for all this was a box of broken fragments of oil pastels a woman gave me a few years ago when I spent a retreat day at Richmond Hill.  I composed a pastel scene there over the course of the art retreat, and she was the moderator.  I don't know, but guessing by the advertising I'd guess these are at least 30 years old. 

This one looks to me sort of like an American Indian design.  

Posting on Instagram, I am at once aware that I can channel a childhood inspiration (being an author and illustrator - voila!), also feeling like an egoist, but also thinking, well people don't have to follow me if they don't want to!  As in art, as in all things, I wonder, who is my audience? Who am I potentially offending? Who thinks I am developing mental illness?  But then I prefer to think, this is for me and let people like or walk by or think what they will.

Sometimes I craft my word pairings with my artwork, labor over them and prepare them, edit them, condense them.  Sometimes they come out more impulsively, which I actually think might be more sincere.  Although it takes a more dedicated writer to write something pithy, I wonder if some of the immediate urges/thoughts/less formulated things that are more natural and easier to digest.

I think the abstract images recently were empowered by a photographer who has turned to some watercolor abstract images recently, feeling herself somewhat limp towards photography.  She described herself, during difficult times, pivoting creatively.  When she cannot make photos, she draws, when she cannot draws, she sings....  I liked this concept and think I may relate, somewhat.  

RECENTLY I have been trying to incorporate more fiction (read an article about the empathy it evokes, and the way it sends connections through all parts of our brain in a way that nonfiction doesn't).  Also, as kind of part of this mission, I have tried to skip over the biographical parts of the authors--for example, in the Norton Anthology of English Lit.  I think I often read a fictional work psychoanalyzing the author, which I think the works are never composed to do.  If I know something about the author, it is is like I am seeking the book for traces of it.  So instead I'm trying to look at the work as the work as the work.  Most assuredly as it is intended.  

Oh, and the other things about oil pastels + abstraction: it's all about the process.  It's fun.