Day 15. On making part of the world

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“In Good Company” 10×10, oil on canvas [creativ_button url=”https://denisehopkinsfineart.com/product/in-good-company-10×10-oil-on-canvas/” icon=”” label=”Buy Now” colour=”red” colour_custom=”” size=”medium” edge=”straight” target=”_self”]

I do this often: buy flowers at the local grocery store with the intention of painting them and instead watch them slowly die in a vase on my dining room table. I say “tomorrow” until I find myself staring at browned stems and shrunken leaves in the bottom of my trash can.

But today, determined not to repeat old patterns, I painted my day 15 painting and started a whole series of other sunflower paintings– who knows what my newly acquired models will look like tomorrow? Nearly halfway through August, and I’m feeling all carpe diem.

Flowers can seem trite as a subject and there is part of me that, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, wonders if my work should do more, say more.

I’m still reading my way through Art and Fear and came across this passage Beautiful and powerful, it speaks so directly to the “why” of my art. I don’t make it because of its potential grandeur or beauty but because it allows me to carve a little, tiny, humble place in this world. That is more than enough and beyond my wildest dreams about what it could do.

“But despite its richness and variability, the well-defined world we inherit doesn’t quite fit each one of us, individually. Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples’ worlds– working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment– and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn’t quite ring true. And so you make your place in the world by making part of it– by contributing some new part to the set. And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.”

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