Beacon - the journey back

"Beacon"
2010, 8" x 10"
Acrylic on stretched canvas






I've been in a painter's block of sorts, my own particular flavour - an 'abstract' block - for months now.  Ideas have been knocking around in my head, but not coming out.  I've not been completely blocked, as I have been creating art - as you can tell from my portraits and other art I've been stuck in the representational or 'real' world for some time now. 

But my passion - abstraction - has been muffled, stifled, plugged up. Like I said, the ideas have been knocking around in my brain, colliding with each other, chipping bits off each other in their attempts to breach the brain/hand barrier and land on the canvas - but to no avail.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm starting to see some glimmers :-)  A little painted-over canvas has been patiently sitting on my easel for months, waiting for me to pay it some attention.  This weekend I finally did, and my experiment and reintroduction to abstraction is the result you see above. 

It's a toe-dip into the pond, a peek around the curtain backstage, a sneak taste of sauce from the pot simmering on the stove.  It's those first tentative steps when the cast comes off, a slow walk before you run the race - it's the beginning of the end of the block.  Yes!

Those ideas banging around in my head? They're starting to line up in a neat and orderly group, and soon they'll make the journey down my arm and onto the canvas. 

In the meantime, I have a whole bunch of little canvasses waiting for me to play with, and I'm still looking for my next portrait model, and preparing photographs for entry into several Calls to Artists.  So the block is dissolving. It has a lot of holes in it now - as a matter of fact, it's starting to look a bit like a sieve.

Hope you had a happy long weekend !

Terry