I've spent the past five years really honing in on a word in my art practice: failure. I've been purposely trying to fail in order to improve my work. Making mistakes make us wiggle and squirm in the studio but they are necessary in order to move forward in our practice. Several choices I've made in my series started out as spectacular failures but turned out to be the turning point in the success of a series.
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| Small foreclosure boro studies. I used to call them boro but no one knew what that meant. |
For the first time in my life I hope not to fail. I've had a bit of a health scare over the past few weeks that has upended our lives in ways I never knew possible. We are still waiting to find out what I have and more than any time in my life, I'm hoping the doctors don't fail me. I realized as I sat with an oncologist (yes, an oncologist) how hard her job must be. She approaches her work completely differently, the absolute goal of not to fail her patients. How hard is that to do? I am in awe of doctors and nurses these days. They have hearts of gold and are just so incredibly amazing. How do they deal with failure?
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| Progress on the Idiom series. Choosing thread was a major decision! |
I am very curious how this life altering change I'm about to go through will affect my work. Will my work become more political, more angry? Will it become more sedate and calm? Maybe I'll just have to try both ways and see which one fails. I look back over all of the work I've done over the past five years and feel like I need to be doing more again. I've had a bit of a slow time in my art while I tend to my life: family, gardening, cooking. And I am passionate about all of those and will not let those go. I would love to be able to combine all of it into my art. Who knows where this path will take me in the next few months but I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I hope to have some new art to share, perhaps small pieces but an effort nonetheless. Go hug your family and appreciate every second you have.
