Curious how...

I am so unsure of myself and these little paintings. I never feel this way about any photograph. Some people ( one client) feels they are too energetic for their purposes. ( although, a big client of theirs , Chase, has been buying the slower ones.)  I try to slow them down. They originate in my love for Japanese art...line art...ink and brush. It's amazing to me how similar they are. I feel like this energy and its need to express itself is like an animal that has been asleep and is waking up in the spring...I need to believe in myself even just a little bit. I was raised to hide my flame under a bushel basket...always being tamped down so it's hard to come out in the open with this work.

As an example…( there are many many examples)

When I was at Plattsburgh, I was taking photography classes, art history classes ( my favorite) and painting classes. I was immersed in art. Originally I was going in the direction of psychology and still have a keen interest in it, but my Father HATED psychology and we used to argue about it all of the time…no support for any direction whatsoever.  They just wanted me to either get married or graduate, work at something (???) and then get married and have children…they would have liked me to have taken the quickest route to being someone else’s responsibility…I was not complying as I was adrift and took 2 years off. My sister was giving them what they wanted, in spades.

Somehow a camera came into my hand during those 2 years and there was no looking back. My father loved taking photos so I would have thought this would have pleased him…but, he went through the rest of his life not understanding me, in the least. So strange as my father was a painter too, he had painted for years, here and there. He had been going out in VT painting landscapes with a group. He painted like Grandma Moses, all realistic subjects. I remember his last painting…it just froze for the rest of his life after he saw my paintings…it was of an old wooden rescue boat from a big ship, tipped on the beach with a sailor next to it…close up…just an outline.

After Plattsburgh, when I came home for a year or so before I moved to NYC, I lived in the basement. I had dragged all of my big abstract paintings home and had them around my dark room, where my father saw them everyday when he went into his workroom or out to his car. I don’t know if he said this exactly or it got through to me by his actions but I read his attitude as…if that is what art is ( my abstract work) then I quit….and quit he did.

So, is it any wonder I am hesitant with self-expression.???

I realize that my mother wasn’t mentioned in this example…she seems mute…My mother was in charge and my father was the enforcer. My father lived his life to protect and do the bidding for the woman in his life. He started at an early age when he had to do this for his own mother…she was in a terrible situation, US depression, poor, downs-syndrome hidden sister and a cheating alcoholic father…my father had to go out and find my grandfather and drag him home…When he married my mother, the protection shifted to her…she was always right, no matter what…so if he had had any other thoughts about my trajectory in life, it would not have mattered. He knew what she wanted and he shut all the doors to questioning to go straight to enforcing. My mother didn’t have to say a word…she was very good at showing disappointment …it helped her cause.

People say that you have to leave the past behind and not let it color the present..in some cases, it's not so easy and at this point in my life, I am grappling with self expression and self belief...maybe it's a little late but I live in a sort of vacuum so when things come up, they come up...I am better to go with it than to fight it like I have my whole life. I would like to leave them behind for good.

 

Screen shot from Instagram where you can see all the similarity.