In the Studio - It's about time!!!

Did you have a good weekend?  I hope so!  Mine was blissful, full of gardening, baking, and Sunday morning breakfast Scrabble on the patio with DH.  That's my new favorite thing I think!

I finally brushed the garden soil off my knees, dusted the flour off my hands, and got myself in my studio.  Now I'm covered in gesso and that is a good thing.  The theme of the month over at Creative Every Day is intuition.  Leah has talked about intuitive painting and had some interviews with a couple folks about that subject.  I've been thinking a lot about this idea and I have to say it's pretty much scared the crap out of me.  Letting go?  Giving control over to the Universe?  Ah yes, that subject has been coming up in my life constantly of late.

Well, I thought I'd give it a try.  What did I have to lose?  I was feeling stuck on my paintings that I thought I was so ready to jump in on, and I needed something to get me back in there.  So I just took a deep breath, put on some Krishna Das, picked up a piece of paper and a paint brush, and just started.  I had to hold hard to the idea that nobody else was going to see what I was doing.  I listened to the music and just added color and lines where ever I wanted.  Instead of focusing on what it was going to be or look like, I just enjoyed the color and the shape of the lines.  It felt good.

Within just a few minutes I was getting ideas for my Ibis that I was stuck on.  I cleared my desktop and grabbed the ibis and my acrylics and went to work with the same notion of staying out of my head.  I gave up trying to make the bird look like the photo and, again, just enjoyed the process.  I was mixing some paint with a broken knitting needle when I thought, "I could paint with this."  And I did and it gave me just the effect I was wanting. 

After I finished with that, I started preparing some surfaces.  I'm going to make some more boxes like this one, and some more of these.  I'm not quite sure what they are, little notebooks maybe?  Whatever, I just like the idea of tiny little paintings tied up with paper and string.  While I was at it, I set myself a goal of doing at least one painting or drawing a week.  I'm going to be lenient with myself on this; some paintings take awhile to finish, so as long as I'm putting good work into at least one painting a week, I'll count that as having attained my goal.

My goal now is to go chill with some internet surfing for awhile before I have to cook dinner.   Ciao!