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My mixed media art room looks like I design for NASA.

Or Nabisco.

Hard to tell…between protractors, engineering templates, plat maps, graham cracker crumbs and half eaten cookies, I turned a master bedroom into an art room and I’m already running out of space.

I’m a sanguine personality type. I live in the moment. If you want something done, ask me to do it today. If you ask me to do it tomorrow, something new will have captured my attention

I need everything at my fingers tips right now. To have to get up out of my chair to find an image that might be somewhere in a box in the other room makes me apoplectic. If I change my focus, even for a second, there is no telling what side hustles are lurking outside my art room, waiting to lure me into their capricious adventures.

I am the plow horse of artists, the ‘timed-test’ proctor of the self-inflicted work-til-its-finished art session, the bleary-eyed occupant of the house with the lights on at 3 am, painting, clipping, measuring, gluing, mixing, arranging.

You would think such perseverance would always pay off.

Not so. I’ve created some stunningly bad work.

When I do, I remember an art teacher who would take a small frame, usually no larger than 5 X 5 and move it around my awful creation until she found what she was looking for and then, as if she had just discovered gold in the Klondike, she would exuberantly exclaim, “AH HA! There it is! The masterpiece within! Work with that, build on it!!

In time, I began to understand she wasn’t as concerned with art perfection as she was about encouraging artists not to be so hard on themselves. Turns out, that’s pretty good advice for everyone.

So now, I accept I will not always like everything about myself, but if I take that little frame and move it around the inner workings of my soul, I will find the little masterpieces within…and I build from there.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

This became my 2020 mantra. Relegated to house arrest by a rampant virus, I was forced to search through the neglected, dusty corners of my art room for anything and everything that would take my attention away from the mini prison of my locked-down home and the inhumanity of closed art stores.

To my surprise, I found 10 tiny bottles of alcohol ink. I had experimented with them in the past, but they were very much like unruly children who test and try you at every turn. It wasn’t long before my patience wore out and they were punished with a permanent time out in the corner of my art room where all misbehaving art supplies have to sit and think about what they did.

Yet, there they were: cobwebbed, crusted bottle tops, ink-stained and unreadable labels, all staring at me with sheepish grins promising this time they would behave.

Uh huh.

The inks thought they had me at first. The same old propensities to run around a canvas like a pack of wild Indians started up, until they saw the “lockdown-haven’t seen a human face in months-out of toilet paper” madness in my eyes. They either knew they’d met their match or they just felt sorry for me.

I don’t care...it has been a lovefest ever since.

Do you ever stop and throw your brush on the floor and stomp away from your canvas,
assured that you are, and forever will be, a terrible artist?

Writers do it all the time. Musicians do it all the time. EVERYBODY does it all the time.
Why are we so hard on ourselves?

Talk to any successful person and they will share their own experiences with giving up, except they didn’t.
The world is filled with frustrated artists of every venue who walked away from their talent because it was just too hard.

I read a quote the other day from, of all people, Jack Dempsey, the boxer.

“Champions are the ones who get up when they can’t.”

Dempsey was an artist in the ring. Some saw him as a savage artist, but an artist never the less.
He had a style of his own and to the average eye, he may have looked like a guy who just got lucky,
but he created a two-fisted, bob and weave relentless attack that gave him over 80 wins in his career,
with more than 50 of them total knockouts and over 20 of those in the first round.

His wife once said, “Jack has a bearskin rug in the den. The bear isn't dead, it's just afraid to move.”

Relentless is not a word most artist use for themselves, but if you are still painting, still writing, still acting, still creating,
then you are indeed, relentless.

Walk across the room now and pick up that brush. Apologize to it then clean it off and go after that canvas
that you mistakenly believe has knocked you out.

The canvas, the paint and the brush have not bested you. They are not the champions here.

You are.

I was working away on a painting of a friend's garden when I heard a knock on my patio door.

By the time I set my brush down and put on my shoes, the mystery guest had disappeared,
like a ghost in the night. Except it was daytime and their plan all along was to sneak up to
the patio door, drop off a bag of fresh vegetables and flowers from their garden.

Of course, I knew who it was. She had been dropping vegetables off all summer. Her
desire for anonymity sometimes broke my heart as it would have been lovely to invite
her in for tea and conversation. But it was 2020 and no one was inviting or accepting
invitations for anything.

Tucked inside the bag of the usual suspects-cucumbers, carrots, peppers, and beets-
were these amazing flowers that, when sitting next to my painting, one would have thought
I used them as a model for my painting, instead of the flowers arranging themselves
to compliment my painting.

But that's the way things happen sometimes.

It reminds me, as an artist, that while I look incessantly for inspiration, maybe
sometimes inspiration is looking for me.