I met with my art student for our first lesson this evening. We are going to spend a month on drawing concepts and skills and then move into painting, which is what she really wants to do. I will post a working syllabus to show how I am structuring our time together and the content of what I am teaching.
I enjoyed tonight! I hope she did too!
So, serendipitously, I am to start teaching private art lessons on Tuesdays. I am excited to journey with and be a resource for another person travelling the artist’s way…
I haven’t been painting…and I don’t have any good excuses. I have been procrastinating. I know the reason is somewhere in my realm of knowledge and I’m blocking/denying it. Fear? Insecurity? I had a perfectly long labor day weekend in which I had the time, but I hemmed and hawed and decided my house needed to be clean and the laundry needed to be done (but those don’t require 72 hours – maybe just three). I did do some reading, but even that was avoidance! I know it! I willfully side-stepped valuable creative time opportunity after opportunity. I know I’ve had other longer hiatuses from my artwork, but none that I was so painfully aware I was taking because I was sulking. Insert image of me at seven scribble-scrabbling angrily over a perfectly decent seven year old self’s drawing, pressing so hard the paper rips. One of the shadows of my idealistic nature is the inward turned eye coping with the discrepancy of things as they are in my life and things as I wish them to be. Yes, fear and insecurity spring somewhere from that place, when I feel I won’t ever be who or what I imagine. Dreaming is necessary. Believing I am entitled to achieving my dreams without the pain of labor and failures (that’s where the sulkiness comes from, really) is vain. Yes, so I’ve hit a rough patch where I am hating my work and hitting walls. So there you have it. The dark side of the creative process.
