Oldie but goodie #3, and thoughts about frustration

This was the third and final still life from art school. Also the biggest. Also the first time I painted glass. I definitely got tired of working on it by the end!


Sold.


I've really been enjoying all your comments about the loose vs. tight painting discussion. I remember feeling dissatisfied from the very beginning about learning the traditional technique that results in paintings like you see in this post and the two previous ones. I didn't know enough or the right language to be able to put that sense of dissatisfaction into words for my instructor (who was a staunch traditionalist). When I said I simply didn't like it, my instructor asked for an explanation, and all I could come up with was, "All these paintings just look like anyone could have painted them." I wasn't referring to skill level but rather to the fact that the personality of the artist was not present. "If you put all our [students'] paintings together, you'd have no way of knowing who did what."


I seem to be back yet again in that place where nothing I paint turns out well. Though I know it's all "part of the process," the sense of frustration can be overwhelming. I know you all know that feeling: you begin to feel you have the opposite of the Midas touch: merde is the result, instead of gold. I'm also having a hard time putting into words what it is I'm not liking about the results I'm getting lately. Why don't I like it? I don't know! I only know that I don't like it. It needs to be more this and less that, or more that and less this... I also am constantly and rapidly swinging back and forth on the loose vs. tight pendulum (I'm not saying I believe either style of painting is inferior). Aaaghhh, such frustration!


This current wave of dissatisfaction has forced me to reflect on, read about, and spend a lot of time mentally pondering not only my own art, but art in general, and looking (online mostly) at a lot of other people's art. I pulled out my old and mostly unused copy of Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Artist Within, and was very struck by a quote I found in the second chapter, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (ignore the sexism):


"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within... Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. ...In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility...when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."

I relate to this quote tremendously as regards creative works (in my case, writing and painting). Have you also had that experience, where you thought to do a certain thing in your art and rejected the idea as silly, or stupid, or worthless, or not worth the time, or some other reason, and then seen that someone else has executed the same idea, and then mentally kicked yourself for not having tried it after all? I also get the same feeling, in a "reverse deja vu" sort of way, when I see work that already exists, but which, when I first discover it, I feel defeated because it's exactly what I would have wanted to do! I feel this way about Rothko, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Richard Diebenkorn, and many other artists whom I discover as I go. A prime example is this contemporary artist whose work I just stumbled upon and I get that all-too-familiar sinking, yet amazed feeling that what I want to do has already been done. Here's the artist: Video of Rebecca Crowell working and speaking about her art.


I don't know what to do with this feeling.


Who will lick my artistic wounds?

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com