Waking up the Muse
An essay of escape
It’s been years since I painted. That’s not unusual for me. My hobbies rotate frequently, because there simply isn’t time to pursue everything I enjoy. I’ll engage in a particular creative endeavor for a while, but when I eventually feel bored and uninspired, I get unstuck by trying something else.
In 2016 the urge to paint resurfaced. I started with acrylics, but they were simply too heavy. I also didn’t want to amass a collection of canvases. They take up too much space, and it’s hard to either throw out or paint over something I feel turned out well. I needed something I could do on paper, because that’s easier to store.
I turned to Bombay India inks with their flashy colors, but I couldn’t find much instruction online for ways to use them. What I did find was a resurgent interest in alcohol inks. Those hooked me immediately, because they flow in mesmerizing ways. You can influence them, but forget about control. Even the colors do things you don’t anticipate.
I practiced enough to reach a level of skill that allowed me to produce this piece. I still love it, and I wish I could figure out how to create a similar look with other media. Why? Because it turns out alcohol inks make me incredibly ill. I simply cannot tolerate the fumes in my home, which isn’t surprising. Disappointing, but not surprising.
I even tried wearing an N95 with the hope I could hang onto this hobby I loved and had only begun to explore. It didn’t help. The chemicals persisted in the air for some time, so it wasn’t enough to mask while I was painting. Maybe going outside would have worked. However, my summers are full of outdoor activities, and art is more of a winter thing. I just didn’t have time to move my art outside.
From there, I returned to the Bombay India Inks, thinking that if I first put acrylic medium on the paper, I could get them to flow like alcohol inks. No luck. And while I loved their vivid colors in theory, in practice they were too vivid for my style of art. I prefer subtlety and flow between colors. The inks just didn’t cut it, although as I type this, I’m pondering whether they would flow in water. Something to try when the mood strikes.
Eventually, I hit on watercolor. Watercolors don’t behave like alcohol inks. However, they do have complex properties, and they flow if the paper is wet. Seemed like a good choice if I didn’t want endless sinus infections. Not being a purist of any sort, I don’t feel confined to only watercolor in my work. Instead, I’ve explored various techniques, leading to this painting:
Not the same style as the alcohol ink fish, but I found this just as satisfying to create. It’s hanging on my living room wall, and I quite like it. It’s one of the last pieces I painted in 2019 before all hell broke loose in my life.
I’ll spare you the long story of injury, illness, and hospitalization I endured in late 2019. Let’s just say I entered 2020 in no condition to pick up a paintbrush, having nearly died at the end of 2019. I could barely function, and then the pandemic hit.
For the first few months of 2020, I was too weak to even think of painting. By the time I was starting to become functional, George Floyd was murdered, and Minneapolis was burning. My own neighborhood erupted in violence, and I found myself entirely unable to lose myself in art. I did try. Over and over, I picked up my art supplies to produce something, anything, but I simply couldn’t do it.
Below is one of those attempts. I will always remember working on this, because a neighbor and I were having a phone conversation about Governor Walz sending the National Guard into Minneapolis that night. I was scared. I wanted the looting and the burning to stop, but I was also scared about what it might take to stop it.
In this piece, what started out as a leaf turned into a cat’s eye as he and I spoke. A cat with an evil, diabolical grin. I named the piece Covid Cat, but it doesn’t hang on my wall. It sits in a portfolio as an historical reminder of that night. A night when my city was falling apart, and I didn’t know if we could pull back together. I didn’t know if the world would ever pull back together, so how could I pull anything together on a piece of paper? Everything was fragmented, and nothing made sense.
The cat might be diabolical, but I didn’t want to end on that note, hence the other doodles. I was playing around with a dip pen nib, never having used one before. I think the mushroom next to Covid Cat turned out well. And see the blue critter above it to the left? That’s my rendition of Moomintroll from Tove Jansson’s children’s books. Extreme stress requires a return to simpler times when the world wasn’t so overwhelmingly scary.
Kind of like now.
Camping and photography were a wonderful escape this fall, but colder temperatures and the first dusting of snow have arrived. I’ve got plenty of pictures to process from this year, and a massive backlog to go through. However, I can’t sit on a computer all the time. I need a creative outlet that doesn’t involve a screen, so I’m trying to get back into painting.
After so many years away, I know better than to leap straight into attempting the kinds of pieces I was able to create back when I was painting regularly. Start small. Start simple. Play with brushes, water, and color, and don’t worry about whether anything “good” emerges. All I’m doing is waking up the muse at this stage.
I hope she wakes up. Playing with color is a good way to get through winter. I may need solstice to come first before I really find my stride, however. Right now, I mostly want to hibernate.
