Lost and Found

The Show came and went and my pieces were not selected. My intellect can accept that this was one person judging on one particular day. But my inner artist was wounded. I reject myself so much that having an unknown judge reject my work feels like a cruel affirmation of some sort. Does this mean I am not mature enough to be showing my work? And yet I am hungry for admiration, for confirmation that I AM an artist; and I am competitive – I want to be “better than” whatever.

For six weeks I’ve done no art. I felt lost. I worried that I was not an artist at all – just a collector of art supplies. I’ve sat at my worktable and played around, reorganized, put things in rows and drawers. And I’ve journaled. Finally I picked up an unfinished altered book that I started for an Artist’s Way exercise. It is tiny – just 2.5X3 inches. My artist voice felt small and this small thing was what I needed to find myself again.





So here it is…”Songs to Aging Children”. I’ve used the text from the Joni Mitchell song because text IS important. Maybe what I’m doing is illustration – but that is art too.