A Week of Blind Sight

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.” ~ Paul Klee

Seven days. One week. The length of a nice vacation or a hike on the Appalachian Trail. Each and every day of creating marks on 10″ x 10″ Fabriano Artistico watercolor paper, felt like a blind endeavor. I am not trained in abstraction nor have I an art degree. Each morning as I woke early and eager to begin these pages, I felt I had absolutely no idea what I was doing nor where I was headed. I may have had some vague notion of how I wanted to begin, what marks to put down first. But then it was my intent to respond intuitively to the marks, brushwork, colors and lines previously set down on the paper. In nearly every case i hit a point where I felt all was lost, I had run into a brick wall. But years of experience quickly move me in another direction, to keep going, to hang with it until…I start to see something.

“Look at life with the eyes of a child.” ~ Henri Matisse 

This is not my first foray into abstraction. Many years ago I painted lots and lots of acrylic on canvas abstracts, or non-objective works, full of color and movement. Several of them adorn our walls. Some have been purchased, others sit in closets or sketchbooks. I don’t quite know what made me stop making them, except for the never ending childlike curiosity I have about all kinds of art and creative endeavors. It is likely that some other interest, like knitting or free-form crochet took hold. But I never stopped making little abstracts in my sketchbook. They are some of my favorite pages. Even my stitchworks of late look much like a painted and drawn abstract painting. I’ve only substituted fabrics and thread for the colors and lines.

Taking up the challenge that Tara Leaver presented to use small bits of time to create a painting a day (or really any other creative work) seemed the perfect way to stay with these beloved marks and see where they might lead. Though I have enjoyed every single day of this challenge, I feel I am nowhere near done with this, and so I’m glad I have 90 more days of the #100DayProject to keep making marks. And I will certainly be making more 10″ x 10″ works, as I have today, even after the Challenge is over. Somehow, through the blind mark making, I am beginning to see.

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ~ Claude Monet

What I’m seeing is not really anything of magnitude. As much as I wish I could see a specific medium or approach to be “my thing”, what I see is a love for and true enjoyment of many ways to make marks on a page. Just when I think I love gray passages of color from acrylic being worked into the watercolor, then I’ll realize how I adore pure watercolor, oozling & wazzling on the page with just a few lines of carbon pencil or oil pastel. And just when I think “Oh yeah Jen, you love the bold bright color”, then I’m longing for quieter tones and lots of white paper. What I’m seeing is that I love it all. All of this resides in me and loves coming out to play on a page, a canvas, a knitted sweater, or a collaged and stitched fragment of fabric. It is a love for life and living that longs to come out in some tangible way. The voices in my head, all discussing and pretending to understand why I do this, are just rubbish. It is not necessary to understand. It is simply necessary to love. Thank you Monet.

And thank you Tara! For presenting a pilgrimage, inviting us to walk it, creating  art in small increments of time, in a series (if the above is really a series?), and to listen as we walk. Thank you for your ongoing encouragement to keep drawing and painting, to push through the blindness until we see through the art to what really brings us joy. I’ll be carrying this week with me for quite a while, and even continuing to make non-objective works of art both in and outside of my sketchbook!

Enjoy the slideshow of this week’s journey into seeing. It includes Day 8. 🙂

“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” ~ Auguste Rodin

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