Oblivious to the Obvious

Shortly after sunrise I found myself in the garden about to harvest the fresh crop of cosmos blossoms.  Cutting them each day promotes new blossoms to burst forth in abundance the next day.  I'm collecting the bright orange blossoms in a bag that I keep in the freezer.  When the bag is full I'll put them through the laking process to create a beautiful pigment for painting.  My habit has been to cut them early in the morning … until today.  I had forgotten how important the blossoms are as nourishment for the bees.

I heard buzzing and saw five bees busy harvesting pollen from the blossoms.  Thanks to having watched the first episode of Secret World of Sound with David Attenborough (excellent program!) last night, the harvesting of pollen was fresh on my mind. 

The health and the cycles of the natural world are important to me.  I care a great deal about the earth and believe it's mankind’s responsibility to care for the earth, to promote its health and wellbeing.  And yet … I find I falter, unconsciously and unintentionally, while at the same time, thinking I’m doing my part to keep nature’s cycles running as smoothly as possible during these horribly polluting times.

While being proud of myself for promoting the proliferation of blossoms and the strengthening of the cosmos plants, I was oblivious to the obvious fact that I was robbing the bees of their necessary food supply, cutting the blossoms before the bees could harvest the pollen.  I had two reasons for growing cosmos in my garden.  The first was to feed the bees, the second was to create dyes and pigments.  How was I so oblivious to the obvious?  How often have I set out on a purposeful path and taken the fork in the road leading away from my primary goal or destination? Far too many times.

In the studio I’ve run into the same situation of being oblivious.  Fortunately, most of the paintings in the PAC (Parc André Citröen) series survived the January flood with only minimal damage. They have many more lessons to teach me, the main one being to make sure I’m working in the studio with my primary intention in mind, not that persistent distracting priority of creating and resolving a successful painting. 

What?  Of course I want to create successful paintings! But … does that, as a top priority and a primary focus, allow room for growth, for breakthroughs, for the unraveling of the past body of work and the weaving of the past into an innovative new future body of work?  No … it does not. 

The loss of the majority of my artwork taught me a painful but useful lesson about letting go. A clean, empty studio has made room for enormous new growth.  It’s no longer cluttered with inventory that constantly nags at me to to do something with it other than let it accumulate dust.  All those destroyed paintings had their day in the limelight. If I had someone who loved to spend their time marketing and selling someone else’s work, AND they were good at selling mine, that would have been ideal.  But that wasn’t, and still isn’t, the situation. Now those paintings are gone. What about the paintings that remain, the PAC Series paintings?

My frame of mind has changed drastically since January, partially due to the trauma of the flood, and more significantly, to having attended Liz Hough’s workshop in Tuscany.  When I now look at the paintings in the PAC Series I find I no longer feel a strong connection to many of them.  In fact, I'm rather irritated by them.

Several days ago, I lined a few up, poured a cup of coffee, sat down about twenty feet away from them and attempted to identify what the problem is.  Why do I connect with a few, but not the others?

I put aside the ones I still related to and continued to contemplate the others. I puzzled over the fact that I had thought they expressed my intention for the painting, whatever that might have been.  Now, I couldn’t find any sign of myself or my intention expressed anywhere in the paintings.  To me, they looked as if I had asked “What if?” too many times in each painting without ever asking myself “What now?”  If there were a story to be told, the story was lost in the chaos.

This is an exciting time.  Autumn is near.  My energy soars in autumn.  I’ve put traveling on hold for a while until I put my house, my garden, my studio and my mind in order.  I’m spending more time reading books and researching topics that will help me in the studio to rework the more chaotic paintings, and to move forward with new paintings. In Tuscany I realized that at this point in my life, storytelling is an important element in my future work.  The story I experience will be quite different from the story the viewer experiences and that is okay.  It’s to be expected.

It's no longer the composition, design, shapes, patterns, textures, lines and colour that are top priority for me.  Of course, they are important. There are not the reason for my paintings.  They are the language I use to tell the story of how I experience life, one painting at a time.

Thank you for reading my blog.

Chris Carter