The Accidental Artist Revisited

I named this blog "The Accidental Artist," because although I've long considered myself as having a way with words, during my divorce three years ago, I started to tap into more visual thinking. I spent hours writing pages and pages of journal entries, but they seemed to be more endless whining and intellectual analysis than anything else.

To get away from that, I began with collage to find my way back to myself in a fashion I didn't seem to be able to do with words alone--or at least with my own writing. I'd pore over magazines, looking for phrases, pictures, anything. that caught my interest and then I'd arrange them in patterns that weren't particularly artistic but that for me, were a departure from my usual.

Since then, I've been mostly successful when I don't plan. When I let my art evolve and emerge from something raw. This piece doesn't quite do it for me because although in some ways it did emerge (I'd planned something totally different, actually) it was still a piece that I thought a lot about as I put it together.

That's my problem in the end--when I think then I can't seem to really create the things I like. The "accidents" usually tend to be my favorites--those pieces that are totally NOT planned. My problem, of course, is finding that place where you are both thinking and not thinking. I have to think to experiment and try new techniques and ideas. But when I do, they are clumsy somehow. And finding my way to not thinking is so HARD. My work demands that my brain is always on call and I've become a woman who multi-tasks, thinks about and evaluates everything. This seems to me to be antithetical to real art-making, but I have yet to figure out how to move beyond it.