How to get unblocked (plus new paintings!)

First, I want to cut to the case. If you have been waiting for new paintings, you can click HERE to see my new works. It's been 9 months, since I released paintings, so if you missed out last time, head over there now!

But mainly this email is about why it took so long (and how to get over a creative block). I hope it's helpful if you ever find yourself in the same place.

I spent the first half of 2022 painting like a mad woman. I had a show lined up at Inspired By gallery in the North York Moors, and I had a massive space to fill. In the end I made over 40 paintings. And then I crashed. I wanted to paint. I went into my studio most days. And often I actually got out paints and brushes and made something. But mostly what I made was awful. It felt like I had completely forgotten how to be an abstract artist.

At first it wasn't too much of a problem because I was teaching my annual courses. I didn't have much time to paint anyway. And when I did have some spare time, I spent it making self-portraits, which I quite enjoyed.

Then it wasn't a problem because I was away on a one month vacation in Cornwall. But when I returned in November, the issue became clear.

I was lost creatively.

The self-portraits had kept me engaged in the summer. I had enjoyed the challenge of capturing a likeness while also conveying emotion and creating an interesting surface. But now, as winter descended, they felt flat and uninteresting. That energy had gone and I didn't know what was going to replace it.

At first I did the thing that never works for me - in art or in life. I tried to think my way to a solution. I tried to create ideas out of nowhere, and I tried to imagine what this new work would look like.

Basically I tried to put my ideas into clearly defined boxes without ever letting them develop. This is a bit like having a baby, dressing it in a business suit, and sending it out on interviews. It's just not ready! 

After a few months of sending that baby out on interviews and making aimless abstracts that looked aimless, I went back to the process that has always worked for me.

Now at this point you might be thinking "why on earth did it take her so long to do something she knows works?" All I can say is that art-making is mysterious. We might know what to do but we can't always do it. And then suddenly, at some point, we can.

I think we all have a creative cycle. It's different for each of us, but when we figure it out, we can honour it more effectively.

Next time this happens, I will step away from trying. I won't think about solutions. I won't make attempts. I'll either stop painting altogether or I will switch back to portraits until the abstract muse returns.

Anyway, back to the process that has always worked for me .... it's important to say this might not work for you. We are all different. BUT, what works for me is to dig into my 'why.' It's to do some thinking - but not thinking about the result. Not imagining what the paintings might look like. Instead I have to think about how I want them to feel or what I want them to convey. I have to journal about what's important to me at that moment. What am I thinking about? How am I feeling? 

This makes sense of course, when you are making abstract work about your own feelings or emotions. How can you do that if you don't know what they are!

So I began with journaling and then with playing on my Procreate app, and then working in a sketchbook.  All the time I was thinking about how this work might feel and what it might say. What elements would be important? What colours felt right.

After a few weeks, I had a list of important elements and a basic sketch to guide me.

Some of the elements I felt were important were black contrasted with saturated colour; structure contrasted with organic marks, wandering lines, vintage collage and off-balance compositions.

Having this list and this sketch helped me to stay on track as I worked. Whenever a painting veered away from the list, I asked myself it it was OK to do so. Was there a reason? For example, a few of the smaller pieces wound up with no black at all, but that was OK because those paintings were still speaking to me. They were still saying something about my experience. 

And that is how I decided whether each one was finished. Did it speak to me? Did it feel like a complete entity, able to go off into the world without me? When a painting reached that point, I set it aside and continued to develop the others.

The series is small (only 14 paintings in all) and I believe there will be more at some time in the future. That's because it's my most personal work to date and I think there is much more story to tell. 

The series is called Pieces of Me, which refers to the fact that each painting contains a piece of me emotionally, but also quite literally. Each painting contains collage papers that come from my own life. There are legal documents and check stubs and concert tickets and bank statements and old letters and newspaper stories. My life is embedded into the paint.

To complete the personal story, I named each painting after a song. These songs are part of the soundtrack to my life. Each one accompanied me at some stage. (If you click HERE to see the private view, you'll also find a playlist made up of the 14 songs.)

Making this work was an emotional catharsis. I feel cleansed in many ways. And this time, instead of trying to think my way to new work, I simply began to experiment and play. I took the elements that I most enjoyed in this series and experiments with them. I had an absolute blast and new work is already emerging.

Lesson learned!