15: Gods & Bogeymen

I’ve been slacking this week. Yeah, I’ve been doing creative-related activities every day, but I haven’t felt like I’ve been pushing myself enough. But it’s a fine line sometimes between playful goofiness and hard-working-artist time. Wait, does that make sense? How do I explain this..?

I said a teeny bit in my post on artistic doppelgangers about the rush I get from “creative discovery”–when you’re messing around with your medium, maybe things aren’t really seeming like they’re going anywhere interesting, and then all of a sudden something changes and things start to sort themselves out in a weird way. It’s those little moments of discovery that really keep me going and inspire me to keep making things, because I always want to see what else might come up. Sometimes that “creative well” seems like it’s running pretty dry and sometimes it feels completely bottomless. I hope it doesn’t make me sound like an asshole to say that for me, lately, the well has seemed pretty bottomless and overflowing with the juices of whatever the well is dipping down into, and I feel like a lazy schmuck if I don’t try to take advantage of it while it’s like that. Because I know from my years of past experience (I’m getting old enough that I can honestly claim that now) that the situation will absolutely change. I will become disenchanted with my work. I will question everything and feel worthless. I will struggle to find some new direction that feels interesting and relevant. But right now I’m in a phase of open acceptance and exploration. It’s mostly because of these hex dancers. Drawing these little figures has really opened up something for me–even when I’m not making an image with one of them in it, I feel like the colored-pencils-on-colored-paper thing is just so damn fun right now. It’s like every piece of paper is a stage and the little figures are magic actors and they can do ANYTHING. ANY MOVIE CAN APPEAR ON THE SCREEN! And I can figure out what those movies are about and how crazy they can get. Maybe they are very quiet little movies. Maybe they are dark and scary. Wait, is this really stupid, to be talking about little drawings as movies? Maybe I should just be using a word like “storytelling.” Because that’s what movies are about, too, so maybe that’s more direct–this artwork is about discovering stories! Blarrrrg.

Anyways, the point of all this is to say that the point of my daily project was to try to push myself into new places, sometimes with big steps, sometimes with small steps, knowing that there will be missteps (like messing with clay). And I just don’t want this project to become, “oh, it’s 11pm, I better throw an image up on my blog.” No! It’s about really trying to “engage with the creative process” (argh, dumb phrase, right?) on a daily basis so that daily life becomes a vehicle for this kind of visual/intellectual exploration. Because it leads to fun!! Right!?! Right! And there’s a certain feeling of pushing against an edge, which is hard to explain, but you know it when you feel it, and making art can be fun regardless of whether or not you’re pushing, but I want to feel that edge, and lately I haven’t been pushing.

So today I made a humble little drawing that I’m actually really happy with. It is a simple drawing, but nevertheless I felt that pushing while making it, because it was digging into the innerworkings of hex dancer psycho-spirituality/lifestyle.

It seems related (slightly) to this piece from November which was in my show at White Square last month:

I think the hex dancer in the God Machine drawing is trying to assemble a giant boogeyman-god like the character in the second drawing (yeah, I know, it just looks like it’s playing with a dollhouse), which will go out in the world and do things…mysterious things…that I want to figure out…