struggle is progress.

I think I am making progress. While it may not be evident in the paintings yet, I seem to have been able to let go of the fear and anxiety about "messing up." I am definitely more calm and willing to accept that there will be good days and there will be very, very bad days! Also, I think the fear and anxiety were partly caused by the fact that I had not painted in a very long time (a couple of years) and I had felt frustrated that I had "lost time" and was now even further behind in ever becoming a "good" painter, a "real" painter, whatever that is, in my mind.

Anyway, lately I've become more at ease with just stepping away, looking at the painting, leaving it alone, looking at it some more, all the while "puzzling" over it and then painting over it. I guess that's progress, albeit at a much slowed down pace.

I've been reading about Willem de Kooning and finding it so enlightening and re-assuring. The book is "de Kooning, An American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.

I read that he taught one summer at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. On the first day of class, he set up a still life and told his class that they were going to work on that same still life for the entire 2 months. I've had a classes like that and balked just as his students did. However, the one thing he said, that my teacher never said, was, "You will work on it until you kill it. And then you will work on it some more until it comes back on its own." (my italics.)

Whoa. I'm very familiar with the part about working on it until I kill it. That's where the fear came in. I would get to a certain point in my paintings and not know what to do next. I'd be afraid to kill it. I had a lot of paintings that got to that stage and then were abandoned or painted over to start something completely different.

So then I read one of his friends Edwin Denby observed that he would start a painting and it would have a "striking, lively beauty" but de Kooning would look at the picture and say, "Too easy." So a few days later, "the picture would look puzzled...now a lot was happening that belonged to some other image than the first. Soon the unfinished second picture began to be pushed into a third. After a while a series of rejected pictures lay one over the other. One day the accumulated paint was sandpapered down, leaving hints of a contradictory outline ... And then on the sandpapered surface Bill started to build up the picture over again."

Shoot, I do that all the time. I thought maybe I couldn't stick to an idea because I don't necessarily start from a sketch. I start with an idea and then just paint whatever I am feeling at the moment. I figured that wasn't very "correct" but that's how I do it.

Granted, I may never have the technical skills of de Kooning, and still am not CONSCIOUSLY aware of an existential dilemma in my paintings, but suffice it to say, it's comforting to know that Willem de Kooning struggled mightily with his work.

I am happy to say that I am finally more at ease with my struggle.