Roaming Instinct – Why Not to Limit Artistic Inspiration
This post is about artistic inspiration and spirituality and enabled by Arts Promotion Centre Finland. This is the seventh blog post of the project, see the first one here, the second one here, the third one here, the fourth one here, the fifth one here, and the sixth one here!
My second big painting is called “Roaming Instinct.”
This painting and the previous big one have been really significant to me.
Regular practice and the big size have helped me to relax and let go – break the glass between the inner and the outer world, as Wassily Kandinsky would say.
Can There Be Too Much Artistic Inspiration?
As long as I have created art, I have been inspired by a variety of things. It has often felt like it’s too much.
Here are some:
- old portraits in fancy dresses
- houseplants and their pots
- midcentury-modern interiors
- colorful kitsch
- primitive dolls
- dressage horses
- English country gardens and cottages
- Tibetan yaks
- base jumping
- mountain climbing
- skateboards
- graffitis
- physics
- outer space
- mathematical algorithms
The list is ongoing and overwhelming!
I think this is not exceptional at all. The world is full of artistic inspiration. Like animals, we have a roaming instinct to explore further. No wonder they say that the hard choice for art-making is to choose what inspiration to pick.
But recently I have felt like I don’t have to pick. No matter what I paint, I can bring it all together. If I paint a flower, it can look like a nomad, or a mountain, or a furry animal, or a space station, I don’t have to define.
Every element can have a strong identity and the overall scenery can have a strong sense of location even if I can’t name it. Some people say my paintings are underwater sceneries, others see outer space. For me, they can be both, and yet neither. I feel I am delivering more than what can be labeled.
Finding Your Artistic Voice/Style/Spirituality/Identity – Whatever You Call It!
I have created art for a long time expecting to become better at what to pick and why. I assumed that art would make me know myself better and yes, it has. But it’s surprising that now when I am painting, it doesn’t really matter who I am and how I get inspired. My art is not to limit or to focus but to integrate.
When I started the project, one of the goals was to get clearer about my spirituality. My question was: “Can a former engineer create spiritual art?”
At the moment, I find it difficult to separate physical from the spiritual. All material things seem to have a spirit and everything immaterial seems to have a figure. When I paint, they mix and merge, and after a while, the painting seems to have a mind of its own. It tells what it wants, and my job is to obey.
Does this make sense? What do you think?
Longing for Freedom – An Intuitive Floral Still Life
This week, I have an intuitive floral still life! It’s the biggest painting that I have made so far – about 47 x 39 inches.
This post is also about artistic and spiritual freedom and enabled by Arts Promotion Centre Finland. This is the sixth blog post of the project, see the first one here, the second one here, the third one here, the fourth one here, and the fifth one here!
About Flying and Freedom
Our back garden is a mall for birds. We get to see many species and, if lucky, some butterflies too. I became interested in birds in the early 90s when I shared an apartment with a friend who had budgies and a cockatiel. Living with the birds made me notice them outside too. And what a great ability they have – flying!
“Free like a bird,” they say, and yes, flying and freedom do belong together. But when a blue tit enters a small bond under our dining room window, I see worry. Worry if he manages to clean himself before my beagles run out of the door or before bigger birds take their turn. His freedom is limited like anyone’s in this world. Even a dove couple who I jokingly call “the owners of the spa” are frightened by their surroundings. Last summer, a dove was killed near our home, maybe by a fox, and it took some time for the couple to reappear.
Flocks, couples – we are born not only to be free but also dependent on each other. When we have each other, we are safer than alone.
But birds have taught me that the longing for freedom is also about safety. The blue tit feels safe enough to wash on the ground because he is free to take off. Insignificant dots, that’s what we all are to him. And still, he also enjoys that we do exist – we who keep the bond clean and pretty.
Intuitive Version of 17th Century Floral Still Life
I wanted this painting to be my version of 17th century still lives. They had black backgrounds and were filled with things that had hidden meanings.
Nowadays, we can be freer and let the colors and shapes hit straight to our souls. We have the artistic and spiritual freedom to create intuitively and also, feel safe enough to open our inner world to others.
Freedom – What are your thoughts? Does it show in your art?
Getting Inspired by Removing the Obvious
This week, I have finished the first painting of the new series, enabled by the grant that I got from Arts Promotion Centre Finland. This is the second blog post of this project, see the first one here!
I wanted to combine two different styles for the painting.
Struggling with Differences
First, I wanted to honor Sandro Botticelli, a masterful painter from the Italian Renaissance, and include some of his colors and ornaments. I especially like the pastel colors in his paintings. Yellow ochre and ultramarine blue look beautiful in the mixtures. Botticelli’s painting The Madonna of the Pomegranate was my main inspiration for the color scheme. I also listened to Renaissance choir music and imagined how he felt when he painted and analyzed his work.
I also had another tutor, Wassili Kandinsky, from the 20th century. I reread his books On the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane and imagined him talking about releasing the inner sound of a shape.
But knowledge and advice and all the left brain stuff can only help to a certain point. When focusing on facts and words, I lost not only Botticelli’s and Kandinsky’s voices but my own too. I ended up making too bold moves and the spirit of the painting was lost.
Indoors – Outdoors
Fortunately, I had to take many sittings because dogs require pauses. It feels that I am constantly moving from indoors to outdoors nowadays!
Then it hit me, that painting, life, and spirituality are not about defining two states like outdoors and indoors. I can bring indoor elements like lamps with outdoor elements like trees. Botticelli broke the division by painting decorative flowers that continued from the grass to clothes.
Removing the Obvious Limitations
And if indoors and outdoors can be one, why not break other obvious limitations too – for example, combine science and beliefs in the same painting.
So I painted a chandelier, Botticelli’s divine rays, a light bulb to honor Thomas Edison, a tiny cross to represent spiritual beliefs. I allowed one association to freely lead to another. My mind was exploding when I thought about light and its all interpretations.
Some people collect chandeliers, others search for a proper lightbulb in a supermarket. Sometimes we believe in science, other times we have different beliefs. Some see angels instead of flowers. Sometimes we need darkness to see light, and other times we may need more light to the lightness. Light can be glitter that saves the day or a more permanent feeling of hope. Art and spirituality don’t have to be separate from the rational and mundane, but they can be the glue between the inner and outer world. We can remove the obvious, and express the diverse experience instead of a single thing.
Releasing the Inner Sound
In the light of removing the obvious, Kandinsky’s idea of releasing the inner sound can simply mean this:
Make subtle changes to an element
so that the obvious interpretation becomes vaguer
and a variety of new ideas are raised.
What could “removing the obvious” mean to you? Tell me what you think!
Art is a Lemon Tree – How’s Your Lemonade?
This week, I talk about art and lemonade and share some news about the rest of the year!
I was going to make a cheerful spread on my colored pencil diary, celebrating a beginning of a period that I have never experienced so far in my life. But I started the drawing intuitively, and here’s what came up: a murky image with a bittersweet impression!
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” they say.
I have never been fond of that kind of forced optimism, but I guess there’s also a seed of truth. In art, you have to make most of what you have.
What Kinds of Lemons Does the Tree Produce?
In 2014, when I became a full-time artist, I thought about growing my skills and how that would naturally lead to something good. But nowadays, my leap has felt more like changing a long CV in technology and service design to a very short, almost non-existent, CV in art.
Art is like a lemon tree. You can nurture it, but you can’t change its variety. Over the years, I have learned not only to teach but also to illustrate, make surface designs, and even draw ornaments and logos. But my heart has always been in fine art, and especially in intuitive abstracts.
In my opinion, fine art makes the best lemons. But the weather is harsh, and the harvest becomes too small to be enough for the lemonade. So my passion for teaching has often been the lemonade maker, not the actual paintings.
But now, things change for a few months. I have got a grant from The Arts Promotion Centre Finland to create a series of paintings and write about the process. I will publish the art and most of the writings here in my blog, so you will also get to drink this lemonade!
The project has a set theme that also includes a background study. I will also continue the colored pencil diary and document a part of the process in colored pencils. Later posts will reveal more.
I hope that my project will also inspire you to create – grow more lemons and make your kind of lemonade!
P.S. You can still sign up for Intuitive Coloring! You will get the published lessons immediately after signing up, and can start having fun right away. >> Sign Up Now!