Backstage

I love backstories, the stuff that goes on behind the scenes—or behind the seens—in art.

Also, I love thinking about where to start the telling of a story.

For this story—the story of a new painting in process—I'm going to begin with a blogpost of mine from June 2016. 

What was I doing poking around old blogposts from 2016, you ask? Well, maybe my story needs to start there.

I recently set out to weed my email to free up some space on my computer and declutter my mind. I have multiple tidy, well-organized email folders where I save messages of importance to me. Within those multiple tidy, well-organized folders sit thousands of messages, a huge number of which (a) are no longer of importance, or (b) I never reference because I no longer have any idea they're there. 

I was able to delete a bunch of folders without a backward glance.

Then I bumped into the folder that contains the nightly emails my dad sent to my sisters and me for nearly six years, starting when my mom had a stroke six months before she died and continuing until my dad's death just shy of a year ago. Those emails I am rereading (and mostly saving), usually in one-week clusters at any one reading. Because I started my art blog a few weeks after my mom's stroke, I am also rereading the blogposts whose dates correspond with whatever cluster of emails I'm revisiting.

Yesterday, I bumped into a post in response to which my muses woke up and took note. I loved the quiet application of neutrals I'd used to start a painting, followed by an overlay of blind contour drawing. Two posts later, I bumped into the very inviting what-if-I-did-this mindset that is always a gift when I paint, and my muses perked up even more.

I thought, what if I started a new neurographic painting with a neutral atmospheric background like this rather than on plain white drawing paper?

To be continued …