Doing Time With My Muse

I have talked about being present when the muse decides to hand me her fire.  I am sure some of you have no idea what  I mean by that.

Mostly it means sit­ting my stu­dio, art­ing, even when I am really not in the mood. I am an artist, and I have some things I cre­ate with­out need­ing that blind­ing flash of inspi­ra­tion the annoy­ing lit­tle fairy pro­vides; I know basic rules of com­po­si­tion and color, I can come up with a plan, and I can whip out that dog por­trait or what­ever with no problem.

I do not know about any­body else, but my muse can­not resist mess­ing with me when I am pur­pose­fully work­ing on some­thing with a plan.  The plan does not nec­es­sar­ily have to be a good one, merely a map to get­ting some­thing done.

Con­sider this paint­ing fire­work.  I took this pic­ture just after a full fire ses­sion with my muse.  The paint­ing was well under­way and I was so excited I snapped a pic­ture with my black­berry and uploaded it to Face­book sometime.

Then I got busy with other things, you know, work, life, stuff and so I lost the feel­ing I had for this paint­ing.  I for­got where I was going with it. I was not sure if it was done, but I didn’t think it was and I did not know what I was going to do next. So it just sat there for a cou­ple of months…

This week­end after I started and fin­ished a 6-piece paint­ing, mean­ing that fairy was hang­ing around the stu­dio somewhere. I decided I needed to stake this vam­pire.  I guess that is another artist type of feel­ing, I some­times feel like an unfin­ished work that has been kicked in the cor­ner is suck­ing energy away from me.  If I really wanna rile up my muse, I just tell her I am going to stake one of her min­ions. Fire­work was def­i­nitely an energy suck­ing vam­pire need­ing to be dealt with.

The plan was to make the crooked bub­bles rounder, since they  offended my sense of order.  And to make the green streamers/snakes stand­out more.  So I got this paint­ing out and started round­ing out my bub­bles. Before you know it she was back, telling me that I needed to high­light the tops of the bub­bles, use the light cad­mium red, etc…  I started work­ing on this paint­ing around 4 PM and fin­ished it about 3 AM.

Such is the way of the muse, time van­ishes while under her spell. The bub­bles are rounder, the snake­like stream­ers do stand out more, but more­over the bub­bles seem more three dimen­sional and there is now a sense of float­ing and depth to the paint­ing all the result of doing time with my muse… Update:  This art­work is no longer for sale.

Yours in art,

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.