The Boring One Now Got Nothin’

I usually am always making something, always working on a series of art pieces, often works on paper. I always have drawings going on in my journal or mixed media as people see in my monthly journal post. For over a year I bored myself with just using thin black sharpie on paper manking similar lines and shapes. I spent a year drawing weird figures, warrior dolls. I got addicted to and obsessed with altering books. Many years ago it was oil psinykngs. I have painted, collages, drawn through the World Trade Center falling down a few blocks from my home and not far from my studio. Sudden terrible deaths, nothing stopped me. Hardly a day without a line. Id be so obsessed with repeating something over and over what I call, getting into the boredom, staying excited about repeating lines, shapes, colors.

For the past couple of weeks it’s been brewing: I have no direction, no interst in any materials, no direction, no new rules of my own to follow. I’m swimming in nothingness. Disinterest. I draw, I use paint, I see but nothing’s really happening. I keep going anyway but for the first time in years maybe since I discovered drawing my second year of college, I’m stumped, blocked, whatever it’s called. I watch my patients be creative. I look on pinterest and the Internet at other artists work. I find work I wish I could copy, I try things, but it’s not working.

I’m not sure how to get through this. I can help other people get through blocks but I’ve never felt this way. Usually it’s something I’m compelled to do and feel like, if I don’t have even twenty minutes to work on my current series I could die. It’s been my lifeline.

This is a terrible feeling. I’ve felt awful about real life tragedies but it didn’t ever stop my going back to the creative well and drawing up the water. I think my well is dry for the first time..,,

What’s hard to explain is that it’s not that I am making nothing or not picking up a pen or colored gel pen or whatever. I drew in my journal on vacation. Today my first day back at work, I drew something. At the end of my day I cut paper and sewed it, trying to get excited about it. I dropped a bunch of liquid watercolor bottles and the Orange red one fell all over a floor right when a patient arrived. I managed to put most of the paint on some collages I’d lost interest in.

I can’t not do something. But I’m trapped anyway because nothing leads me to any discovery. If I really just stopped it would have to be that I’m dead. Even as I write this I want to draw in my journal just to be ok with myself even if I’m not into it.

I still need that feeling of making marks on paper with some kind of tool. I am grateful that I’m not stopped,just feeling empty, emptified.. 

These are photos from today’s spill and my sewed paper. I think doing those art cards for creative deed 365 was a way of covering up this empty feeling…