Class notes from Reinventing Your Creative Process with Andrew Long, Fall 2007

I am so going to miss these classes with Andrew Long.  He said this would be a life-altering experience, and as grand a claim as that may sound, he wasn't kidding.

My work changed fairly dramatically after taking the first version of this class with him last spring.  I started aiming again for complete abstraction (often my first love when viewing art) -- just playing in the studio, and following the brush where it led.  I was experiencing a real joy in painting - not that I haven't usually over the past decade or more, but now I was giving myself permission to explore with a new kind of freedom.  Some of the paintings I did in the past 6 months or so have been more successful than others, and I do really love them.

But when presented with questions like, "why are you painting what you're painting?"  "Are you saying something?"  "What's the difference between this painting and wallpaper or a tablecloth or whatever?" -- I had to take a step back, take a good hard look, try to evaluate my own work without that proud attachment of "I did this" achievement. It's been a very painful week of soul-searching.

I have no idea if I'm ever going to be a painter who does more than pretty paintings to decorate your living room walls with.  But, my concerns are deeper than that, my interests are broad and varied -- I hope I can finally find a way to incorporate all my visual interests with the less visual topics that fascinate me into a cohesive body of work -- my own world of interests, coming together in a beautiful visual language or world of my own.  Why not mix abstraction, representation, diagramming, mapping, and all visual forms of communication on the same canvas?

Give me 6 months, a year, maybe two -- or perhaps more -- and let's see if I can really re-invent myself this time into a painter that bears paying attention to.