I haven’t drawn in several months as I have focused my attention on painting and on marketing. I spent more time and energy marketing my art than I have painting.  Finally, I thought I had done enough and could turn my attention back to art making. This past Saturday I picked up a pencil and lay down a clean sheet of paper. Even more so than painting, drawing is a love story between me and the object of my attention.

When I set out to create I don’t know where I start nor do I know where I end. The more I make art the more it becomes about failure and mistakes than about success and yet, I tell myself,  the journey is something much greater than the imagined destination.

I think I would cease  to exist if I reached my destination.  Our work is born out of a quest to explore that which remains stubbornly unknown to us.  For all of us, artists and otherwise, we consider ourselves accomplished if, in course of our work, we advance our knowledge even a little bit.  I seem to be going in a reverse direction because I know less as I go along rather than more.  It takes courage to take up the brush day after day to pursue an open ended inquiry and I must repeatedly teach myself that the process of making art, ie, watching, recording, discovering, assimilating is what making art is all about and the original destination I had in mind when I first embarked on this journey is nothing but a fleeting memory of youthful exuberance.

Life beats down

And crushes the soul

And Art reminds you

That you have one

Stella Adler

Here’s one to chew on: “Art lives primarily in the mind,” so says Duchamp. And so does sex. Does that mean sex and art come out of the same place? Is creative energy as abundant as sexual energy? Or do some use the energy creatively and others use it sexually? Would we artists be threatened if creative energy was as abundant as sexual energy?

I, for one, am absolutely convinced each and every one of us is imbued with creative talent and one of our life tasks is to find out what that talent is.  Obviously we are not all musicians, knowing well my own tin ear. Not all of us are painters either. A friend of mine can bake as good or better than any bakery I’ve yet experienced here in San Francisco and another friend channels her energy into beautifully thought out interior spaces. A third can put herself in the most graceful of yoga poses; you know the ones that make the rest of us feel we were not engineered to “do that.” These are ways in which some of us express a part of ourselves that artists make a career of expressing.

I wonder if I lay down with my paints will I , afterwards, create a better piece?