Writing Project: Images that tell a story: Photos and images reveal a story to see if you can find the story within a photo or painting. Answer these questions:
Where has the image taken you that you didn’t expect to go?
-Laura
Painting detail from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
As it so often happens after a burst of creative power we find ourselves at a dead stop, crippled to move forward. What is it that stops the momentum? More importantly, how do we get it back? When we begin a project it holds a sense of mystery and promise. This fuels our creative energies. But as the project continues and we are faced with challenges and obstacles that energy can begin to wane. Any endeavor takes discipline and dedication and we can easily begin to doubt our efforts. We hope to regain that creative promise we first felt at the start.
One useful approach is to set the project in question aside and begin another work, preferably one that differs dramatically from the one you put aside.
When I first started art school I had a very difficult time keeping a sketchbook. The critic inside of me wanted every page to be perfect and I'd get frustrated when a sketch came out, well not as I would have wanted it to. Then in a desperate attempt to fill the pages, I began searching through discarded drawings, paintings, color studies, notes on lessons and lectures, postcards from museum and gallery visits, all the remnants piled in an old archival storage box I kept. I composed the pages grouping like topics together and when the page was complete I'd add addition notations. It was the birth of my journals...
Now, so many years later, volume after volume fills my studio bookshelf. Each one a reminder of progress, learning, and achievement. Long after my hands are too feeble to hold a paintbrush, I will still maintain a visual journal. It’s as necessary ad breathing.
-Laura
In the beginning, what started out as a simple attempt to fill the vast blank white pages has now evolved into an invaluable tool within the creative process. It is a method used to open up ideas that I believe is not only a fertile approach but also a therapeutic one.
I kept a diary as a young girl and then later as an adult, but I've learned that by fortifying it with imagery I can breathe life into it and now the words and images are inseparable, each holding equal importance. Over the years I can see the evolution of my work. It has helped me to organize my thoughts, to see my way into a project, and then out again; it jump-starts an idea from a thought in my head to a realized work of art, and in the journal lies its inspiration, motivation, and history step by step.
-Laura
Athens: Graphite
After accomplishing the first steps towards working your way into any given project, the next most difficult task is to keep the momentum going. How do you meet with the page every day? Is such a commitment even possible? We can begin to feel overwhelmed, begin to doubt our abilities (oh no, here come those voices again). All that you overcame to get you to this point seem just ahead, around every corner. I won’t lead you to believe that they’re not. Even the most accomplished writers and artists face their demons time and again.
