Reflections from the Studio #1: The Real Deal

I’m hoping to make this a regular feature, where I share a bit of my journalling from the process of putting together this crazy book, and maybe giving an insider’s look into my day-to-day, my thinking, and my struggles.

I was once told that I was envied for being an artist, as it would be so nice to just relax all day and paint. I cannot express how much that has made me laugh over the years…maybe I’m too…demanding of myself, or maybe I struggle to make things look like what I see in my head, but I can honestly say that painting all day is painful, not relaxing.

The beginning of a painting is the creative bit—the math for the composition, figuring out dimensions, printing papers to gauge the individual strength of the image, stretching canvas and the physical strain on hands as I pull metres of stiff gessoed canvas around four pieces of wood, using my power stapler to tack it in place…I love this bit, even if I usually end up with a headache and backache. This is the exciting bit where I have hope that the vision in my mind will finally be what I put down on canvas.

Once I’ve drawn out the image—like a road map of sorts, with symbols and lines that tell me what kind of terrain I’m wanting to remember when it comes to putting paint to canvas—I can feel the real rawness of the process start. 

There’s this weird thing that happens when I paint. It’s like railroad tracks. I start to run a parallel journey with whatever it is that I am working on, whether it be a personal connection with the model, or with the symbolic journey that the painting represents. With the Strawberry Girls project in particular, I thought that I would have a distance emotionally from the works, as I don’t know many of the girls themselves, and I am physically not involved presently in the rescuing and rehabilitation process. But I was wrong.

As I paint these works intended for the book, I have begun to notice that I must alternate between the ‘freedom’ side of the odyssey and the ‘slavery’ side of the journey, so that I don’t completely synchronise emotionally and perhaps even spiritually with the unfolding of each Strawberry Girl’s story. There are some paintings that I have had to postpone, and some that I have had to axe completely, and even one that I have attempted 5 times now, and it’s like each takes on a life of its own. There are works that defy description in that I cannot explain what has happened to me as I have worked on them. For good and for bad.

Some works I have hidden behind others, as they are too raw for me to look at daily, and yet I know they must be painted, and I believe that they need to be ‘spoken.’ I get one image to make a connection, and that image must be powerful, and many days it comes at a high personal cost. But is it worth it? Absolutely. Maybe one day I will be allowed the grand privilege of hearing how one girl got free because I painted a picture. Wouldn’t that be amazing?