Coming Back to Creativity

Not that I’ve been blocked or anything, but my excuse is that visual art has been a casualty of everyday busyness the last few weeks. Every day something seems to come up that keeps me away from my studio space. After two hours rearranging art supplies last week, I realized that forward momentum towards actually creating art had sputtered to a stop.

A few days ago, the embarrassment of showing up week after week to two different art classes with no work to share, got me at least messing around with paint and some collage elements. For one class, the assignment is to work with narrative in an abstract form. My artwork is due for critique next week.

Early in the class, the idea for a narrative squirmed to the surface…and then got clogged in some emotional gunk before I could get to work. Attempts to plough through the blockage failed. A faint ray of sunshine revealed the obvious…there’s another story to be told and until told, everything else is on hold.

That’s happened with my writing more than once. A big writing idea molders in the back of my mind while I resist setting down the words that need to be said on a totally unrelated subject. I spent a year once avoiding work on a mystery novel while I fought to finish the story of my first marriage. Strangely, the week I finished that tale, I also wrote a thousand words of the novel.

So, I faced up to this block…and admitted that it was time to address some anger and pain that was wasting my energy and draining my creativity.

The piece is titled, “Black Hearts.” If I stay on trajectory, it will be finished next week…along with a written narrative of the story that had me hung up. Here’s a glimpse.