Janet Towbin, from the Milano Series, mixed media on canvas, 2007, 24″ X 24″.
I think I finally hit my stride in the studio. Last night I completed a new canvas that I am very happy with. The square format works well and the colors turned out better than I had hoped. I think it’s a winner. Hopefully, this painting (and others) will travel to Santa Fe at the end of the month to be in a new gallery. It’s all in the works and I don’t want to jinx the negotiations by giving out too much information. I will post again when things are more certain.
It has been a struggle these past couple of weeks and it didn’t seem like I would win the battle of paint vs. artist. But I got over the hump of working in a small, cramped and horrendously messy space and found that ever-elusive sweet spot of creativity. Whew! Whenever I face a blank canvas, I am never certain I will be able to find my center of creativity again. It is like searching for a valuable gem put away for safekeeping, and then freaking out because you can’t find it right away. You know it’s there, you hope it’s there, but where is it??? Well, that was me, freaking out in my studio just days ago.
Now that I’ve found the “gem” again I am worried I will have to stash it away as classes begin in two weeks and I have tons to do to get ready for them. I need to plan my classes week by week, organize materials, books and projects, prepare syllabi, compile art supply lists and all the other organizational paperwork necessary to begin. I am also reading several books on feminism so I can properly discuss this topic in conjunction with a collage project I intend to assign my students. The project will be to read Herland (a book about a feminist Utopian society) written in 1915 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and to create a…. Ah, I don’t really want to say exactly what the project is, yet. I will eventually divulge the information, but not until my students hear about it first. But here’s a hint: it involves flags…
Bathed in War’s Perfume by Walt Whitman, 1900
BATHED in war’s perfume—delicate flag!
(Should the days needing armies, needing fleets, come again,)
O to hear you call the sailors and the soldiers! flag like a beautiful woman!
O to hear the tramp, tramp, of a million answering men! O the ships they arm with joy!
O to see you leap and beckon from the tall masts of ships!
O to see you peering down on the sailors on the decks!
Flag like the eyes of women.
Finding a poem that compares a flag to a woman is brilliant! I love Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. How serendipitous that I came upon it just now as I was writing this post.
There is a saying in medical schools and teaching hospitals about how to become proficient at a task: “See one, do one, teach one.” Teaching is truly the best way to learn anything. I just worry I might be learning more than my students!
Content and photos copyright 2007 by Janet Towbin.
