“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ~ Pablo Picasso

This felt like a LONG week. In addition to everything that everyone else experienced, there was some sad, personal news from my work place. Wednesday night I turned off everything and doodled this.

“Blue Thoughts” – 2021, Pastel on paper

Friday was the first session in the new Roaring 20’s Mentorship. A few things have changed this semester, including the group of artists I’ll be working with. This time I’ll be in the 8:00am pod with Alisha Whitman, Angela Grainger, Becki Hesedahl, Frances “Fran” Turner, and Paula Fontanini. Fran is from exotic Ontario, Canada. Art is truly a world uniter! As I mentioned last week, I’m going to work with the photo references from my time at Keeneland: The “Homey Feeling of Horses”. We are going to be reading the book “Unleashing the Artist Within“, so I need to get busy on that.

Saturday, I can’t claim I approached my painting space with huge amounts of enthusiasm. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to paint; it’s that all my ideas felt SO HARD.But painting was a big “meh”. But I liked something that Ruth said in the Friday group. She talked about the idea of “exploring” your art rather than “performing”. As artists, we get locked into the idea of creating something that “showable” or “sellable” or “part of a series” or whatever that we forget about just saying, “What if…” So, with Pablo Picasso’s great quote in my head, I sat down with my notebook to work through some ideas.

Ruth assigned a set of challenges to January (focus on value), so I set out to explore them.

By the time I was done with the fourth study, I was excited to explore a real painting. So, I did!

I had to stop here because the paint needed time to dry. My next step will be to take off the matting and see what I have.

I leave you with a quote I read from admired artist Kate Dardine‘s blog.

“But what thrilled me the most was the fact that millions of meteors burn up every day as they enter our atmosphere. As a result, Earth receives ten tons of dirt from outer space. Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust.” – Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds.

Somehow it made me feel better.