Making it up as I go along
Before leaving on my walkabout at the beginning of December, I made myself another You Bag with my sweetheart’s face on it.
photo by Michelle
The bag is another two-sided creation, sort of like this one, except that it’s twice the same face. I wrote about the making of the other side, before I left.
photo by Michelle
After spending a few weeks with my grandmother, I met up with David in Manhattan—that’s where we are in these photos, freezing our faces off in the New York cold.
I was supposed to spend a weekend with David and his family in New Jersey, and then come back to Portland.
Things didn’t go quite according to plan.
The biggest snow storm of EVER (I’m going by eyewitness accounts) hit the Northwest last week, and I was stranded out east.
It was a bi-coastal snow day!
And it kept me out of my studio an extra ten days or so.
Between my planned visits and the extended part of my trip, I haven’t touched a paintbrush for a month now.
While I’m glad to finally be home and vaguely overwhelmed by all the work I have to catch up on, my weather-induced vacation reminded me of how important it is for me to make things up as I go along.
I do that in my work. I think it’s the only way to make a painting: adapting to whatever the composition is doing at a given moment, making marks without knowing if they’ll make sense and then responding to what those marks do to the work.
But I guess I don’t always do that as well in my life—not unless front after front covers my home in snow and forces me to do so!
All of which is to say that, while art-making usually finds its muse in life, the inspiration goes both ways. Life can learn from painting too.
Gwenn Seemel
David
2008
acrylic on one side of a canvas tote
14 x 14 inches
(detail below)
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