Thursday, July 25, 2013

Stuck

… I have over a dozen old computer books sitting on my shelves with nice quality pages waiting for me to draw on them … actually … they call to me … "pssst, Ida, we're just as good as that drawing paper you spend a lot of money on, we're just smaller" …

… so! … there I am … thrilled … paper that I can draw on … and play and experiment with … never to worry about the cost of the paper … and my first attempt was genius … !!! … but … I knew my temperament wouldn't see me through to the end … though I enjoy finding found poetry within every page … I didn't [and don't] want to spend my days drawing black marker lines through entire pages for a few magical words … again, it's too mechanical …

… also … despite being disappointed … despite being frustrated … artists become inspired by experimenting … no matter how bad the finished project … if there is no inspiration … [some kind of emotional feedback to what we are doing] … we know to close that door and open another … that is, sometimes …

… Japanese prints were my original inspiration to experiment with those computer pages … what I love most about Japanese prints is their combination of text and imagery … especially their landscape prints and how the text looks like falling rain … but that's because of how they write … they don't write across a page, they write in a column … and I love the results …

… surely, I, … with all my education … can come up with something similar but using my American language and the ready-made computer text … how hard can it be …

… alright … I got ideas … I got tons of ideas … I thought, I'll use the paper for sketches for my larger work … black china marker sketches should play nicely against black text and computer diagrams … except … after a few pages of sketching, I realize that I like to work out my problems directly on the canvas … instead … I had added an extra step that did not psychically reward me or get me closer to my goal … phooey and heck …

… so, maybe I need color and tried gouache … nope … the paper won't hold up …

… next, I tried brush and ink work like the Japanese … nope … the paper won't hold up …

… next … next … next … the more next(s) I tried … the more I realized I was getting away from my original inspiration … those [damned] Japanese prints …

… it's now going onto three years of labor … and nothing's working … !!! …

… but it's like Thomas Edison said after 20,000 failures … I know I was years ahead of my competitors because … I knew what wouldn't work …

… well … I still have a couple thousand pages left to scribble on …

Ida Kotyuk, Portrait Painter©
If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough

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