Is that you, dear dusty creativity?

Yesterday's and this morning's pictures remind me of high school, when I was a girl studying art. My beloved art teacher, who has since passed on, once criticized my work as too stylized. He thought my stuff ought to be more artistic. I wish I hadn't believed him. But that was a long time ago, and since then I've doggedly stitched back up this false divide in my art.

January 24-25, 2011

Do you see hints of the Jack of Spades, the Hulk in man-form, an Inuit spirit in these little pictures?

I'm glad to see some imagination slink back into my art. Mostly I've used bus drawing as technical practice (e.g. fabric, hair, texture, etc). Maybe the brain just plays with anything it's working on, whatever it is? I like the idea that playfulness and creativity are things I couldn't keep away, no matter what my life circumstances were.

Over the weekend, I read a blog by a lady who spent a few months trying to figure out why she couldn't get herself into the studio now that her kids were finally in full-time kindergarten. At first she thought it was because she was out of practice, not having done much art over the last few years. But in her last entry she said that she had realized that art wasn't that important to her anymore, and that her family occupied all the spaces that art used to live in.

I've made that same conclusion more than once. Buuuut –

Art came back the very next day

Art came back, I thought I was a goner

BA-DUM-DUM-DUM...