Class notes from Reinventing Your Creative Process with Andrew Long, Fall 2007
I am so going to miss these classes with Andrew Long. He said this would be a life-altering experience, and as grand a claim as that may sound, he wasn’t kidding.
My work changed fairly dramatically after taking the first version of this class with him last spring. I started aiming again for complete abstraction (often my first love when viewing art) — just playing in the studio, and following the brush where it led. I was experiencing real joy in painting – not that I haven’t usually over the past decade or more, but now I was giving myself permission to explore with a new kind of freedom. Some of the paintings I did in the past 6 months or so have been more successful than others, and I do really love them.
But when presented with questions like, “why are you painting what you’re painting?” “Are you saying something?” “What’s the difference between this painting and wallpaper or a tablecloth or whatever?” — I had to take a step back, take a good hard look, try to evaluate my own work without that proud attachment of “I did this” achievement. It’s been a very painful week of soul-searching.
I have no idea if I’m ever going to be a painter who does more than pretty paintings to decorate your living room walls with. But, my concerns are deeper than that, my interests are broad and varied — I hope I can finally find a way to incorporate all my visual interests with the less visual topics that fascinate me into a cohesive body of work — my own world of interests, coming together in a beautiful visual language or world of my own. Why not mix abstraction, representation, diagramming, mapping, and all visual forms of communication on the same canvas?
Give me 6 months, a year, maybe two — or perhaps more — and let’s see if I can really re-invent myself this time into a painter that bears paying attention to.