Spinning

My life is jam-packed with good ideas and opportunities.

Over the summer it was energizing and thrilling.

Right now it's just overwhelming.

It's been sneaking up on me, stealthy and quiet, but I've chosen to ignore it.

Bad feelings have been circling like turkey vultures and I'm down here in my shiny costume, tap-dancing and spinning my plates in the air.

Tra, la, la.

 Here's the spiral:

1.  try to do everything

2. get overwhelmed by "to do" list

3. berate self for not achieving the impossible

4. become immobilized by bad feelings

5. berate self more for being lazy and doing nothing

6.  take on more responsibilities to prove that you are not lazy and incompetent 

7.  go back to the top of the spiral and do not admit to yourself that you are miserable

I've worked really hard over the years to break old patterns of behavior and re-write old scripts.  Still, there's a perverse comfort to this line of thinking.  It's so familiar!  I know how the story goes!  I can inhabit it so easily and I won't need to challenge myself! Hooray!

 Plus, there's so many ways to feel sorry for myself in this story.  I can walk around with the back of my hand pressed to my forehead and sigh a lot.

 It's been tempting to just close the studio door and crawl away from it.  Get in bed tell myself stories of martyrdom,  helplessness, and victimization.

Instead, I'm painting like a mad woman, because when I'm painting the vultures stop circling.  

Excited by the colors and textures of this piece I made over the weekend, I decided to explore it further and to work on canvas instead of cardboard.

It started like this:

 The blue circles on the left are paint samples, there's a bit of a muslin bag at the top, and another image of a plate spinner in the center.  I squeezed on some blobs of paint and spread them all over the canvas with a brayer.  I kept adding more layers and colors.

I totally regretted that orange as soon as a laid it down, and since I wasn't waiting for each layer to dry, it was quickly becoming thick and muddy.  Rather than waiting for it to dry and covering it with gesso like a sensible person (heaven forbid) I grabbed some plain paper and laid it on top of the painting and rolled the brayer on the back of the paper.

It looked really cool after a bunch of paint had been lifted off because you could see little bits of background showing through:

And I got these really interesting mono-prints too:

I was so entranced by the grungy layers I nearly stopped, but I knew I wasn't done.  I kept adding layers of paint, and got so excited I stopped taking pictures of the stages.  Here's where the frenzy ended in the wee small hours of this morning.

I had fully intended to use beeswax in this project, but now I'm not so sure.  I'm liking it the way it is.  I'm going to sit with it for a few days.

Here's to the start of a 3-day weekend
and Paint Party Friday
and letting the plates crash to the floor if that's what it takes to stop spinning.