A couple of weeks ago I made a small jump, which I’ll just call a segue, from my Frank Lloyd Wright series.

I used essentially the same format – vertical colors with the circle near the bottom – but this time I had no reference in mind for the colors and I ditched the horizontal panel on which the circle rested in the previous paintings.

As usual, I had a vague image in my head – colors I thought would work – and also as usual, I ended up with something quite different.  I’ve fallen for Golden’s Azurite Hue and have been using it a lot.  This time, it’s definitely the leader of the color pack.

See above. So much for the small jump.

The big leap happened today and is still a work in progress.  I’m still attracted to the vertical and the circle, but I went a few steps farther. I began with the vertical colors, then realized I was working with colors that didn’t feel like me. I had wandered away from the blues and lighter shades and found myself in an uncomfortable place with an 18 x 24 “something” I didn’t quite know what to do with.

I’m beginning to recognize this sense of discomfort.  In other parts of my life, I seek as little discomfort as possible. I want a comfy bed and not a plank on the floor.  I want a tasty meal and not porridge.  I want shelter from the storm and not holes in the roof on a rainy day.

But when it comes to the painting, I’m getting it. In fact, this is how the Frank Lloyd Wright series began.

I’m learning that the discomfort, the unfamiliarity is likely leading me to something worth doing.  So today, I pulled out the pastels and began to draw on the vertical acrylic colors.  Drawing has not been part of this so far. Today it is.  Swooping curves to pull in that circle shape I like so much.  And then I started messing. Messing with glazes and other colors and ideas.  If someone had walked in and asked me what I was doing, I would have had to shrug my shoulders and give them what a friend calls my pirate smile.  He describes it as kind of goofy but also kind of “I don’t know.”

There’s a quote from my favorite book about writing that goes like this:

“If we suppress our wackiness we’ll seal off the source of some of our most truing impulses. Our potential will dwindle. We’ll no longer feel the sweet daze and speed of the push of it…We’ll move only in straight, strait lines, turning only at right angles or in rigidly measured departures from them. No use to tell ourselves then that we are conservative, for we save nothing; or that we believe in classicism, if we don’t enliven its continuation. We’ll be conceitedly atrophic.” –David Greenhood, The Writer on his own

I’ll let you know next time how things turned out.  But I know for sure I like being wacky a lot more than atrophic.