Pleinair Painting

I don't know if all artists go through a reinvention process. I only know that after spending two weeks in the forest alone painting, I came out a different person. Since that time, I have looked at my massive body of work with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. It's almost as if it didn't come from my hand, but was the work of someone else. Someone who was readily influenced by the demands of clients and was responsive to a public that constantly wanted something other than what they were doing as an artist. Believe me, I have been grateful for the work. And, I have been fortunate to have been able to deliver so many different styles of work for so long. But now, I'm finding that a different voice is speaking to me, a personal one. One that keeps asking: "What do you want to say?" And, I think that's an important question. So, I'm trying to answer it. Little by little over the past two months, I've made some progress. It's not a verba...

A few days ago I went to a film entitled: "Midnight in Paris." A line from that film haunted me. The author Hemingway is speaking to the main character, Gill, (also a writer) and he asks Gill if he is afraid to die. Because, Hemingway tells him, if you are afraid to die, you can't be a writer. He goes on to tell him that he must be fearless in all things. I have been struggling with a mural for the past month and I had finally decided that I just wasn't going to get the effect I wanted with the painting...so I was about to give up and deliver it to the client. Over the weekend, I went Plein air painting with the Michigan Plein Air group...and my frustration with the mural seemed to have transferred to my painting there as well. I was disgusted with my work. At one point, I took the watercolor and dunked the whole thing into the creek. ...It made it better, but I decided to tear it up anyway and start over. I became a destroyer of worlds that day...my own worlds. And, ...