Past entries show the visual process of making a painting. Today I was thinking about the unseen, mental process. Is it of interest? I don’t know, but it’s part of my work.
So many ideas and directions bombard daily, it’s sometimes hard to settle on something to completion. It’s too easy to get sucked up in tangents.
An idea for a new painting formed and demanded attention during this morning’s shower. While my mind kept flitting and the earworm music popped on and off, alternating and combining with the shower sounds, this painting idea kept poking me until it was so firmly rooted that I have to put it on paper or canvas. The tangent: How did the idea for this particular painting came into my mind’s eye? Was it conjured by the scent of the soap?
The mythical Hydra part of thought-following: you follow one line and find two more spring up, fully formed:
I followed the line of thinking that sensual input could trigger the image in the mind that wants to be painted, in this case, aroma of soap could be trigger. But following the aroma trail lead to the memories that are conjured up by it. Do they have anything to do with this idea for a painting in the mind?
Scents and flavors, and sometimes sounds, come to me when I paint that aren’t in the actual atmosphere at the time, but I think they might present because the subject matter of the painting (or sometimes just color) arouses them. (The smell of a hot garden, a dusty road, the leaves in a breeze sound, etc.)
But this is the germ of the painting coming from...where?
In addition to the scent of the soap, recent conversations, events in the world, emotions, a recently read poem, and even a recent painting swell the seed of the painting that’s in my mind. But where did the seed come from? Other things, not considered here, likely come into play, as well. But this is as far as I swam this morning. We’ll see how the painting comes out.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer....
ReplyDeleteIf you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 4, 1903