creation

I jotted down these thoughts when I was getting ready to start this painting:

Preparing for a painting is what I imagine it would be like to prepare for childbirth. That being said, I’ve had no children, so I really have no idea what I’m talking about. But there are similarities here. I am making room, I am preparing a place. I anticipate a period of discomfort and tiredness and struggle. I likely will want a lot of salty snacks, and find myself eating junk food at 1 in the morning. There will be moments of excitement. I will fear I’m in over my head. And it will require a great amount of pushing when I feel I have nothing left to push with.

It’s simply true that the birth of anything is accompanied by stuggle and pain. And still we enter this act of creation by choice, because of love. Because it gives us purpose. You brace yourself. And you decide to trust yourself, I suppose.

Now, I am about finished with it, and I thought as I worked that this was all true. But then realized maybe it’s more like becoming obsessed and simply going mad. Just a little. Or just for a while. Yet, a good bit of self-inflicted isolation and an unwavering thought-devouring stretch later, it occurred to me that making art is perhaps more like running a marathon.

None of these seemed entirely it, and so I concluded that the art process I often experience when making a piece with a certain deadline is most certainly a combination. Like giving birth while running a marathon and decending into madness. …? I’m sure this is how the masters described it, too.