My festive mood started before Halloween this year, which is weird for me because Halloween has always been my favorite. I usually go all out with the spooky decor in my front yard and the well-planned costumes. But this year I was ready for that cozy, glittery, festive time in which I could eat comfort foods, decorate cookies, and snooze by the blazing fireplace. Needless to say, when the jack-o-lanterns came down I was setting up my Christmas village and buying fire logs.
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The year started quietly for me, like the morning after a good snowfall. Muffled. Dormant. I was a hibernating bear.
Needless to say it took a few days to get back into the groove of creating. My goal was simple for the month: form a gouache habit so that I could start—and successfully complete—a 100 days project.
That project starts January 30th.
But the new year, as I’ve said before, isn’t a cure-all. Looking behind me, beyond that dividing line between 2022 and 2023, my art had been lacking in something, and still was. I felt free in scribbling, as usual, but there was just something…hollow about it all. Maybe I’d just fallen into a routine of “sameness” and my work had become less about expression and more about muscle memory.
However, after the process of forming this daily gouache habit began, I came to my first conclusion: my world didn’t have enough color.
In the past I’ve always kept my tones a bit desaturated so that they would appear more natural, organic, and sophisticated. Which is interesting to me because if I were to describe my personality it would be the exact opposite. Loud, vibrant, and playful. A bit much at times.
But just working with vibrant colors wasn’t enough. While my studies gave me a buzzy feeling, my larger works were still lacking in something, despite their newfound vibrancy. After a week or so of discovering new artists, creating vision boards, and self-exploration I came to my second conclusion: the loud colors were coming across, but the playful aspect was not.
So I turned a geometrical “almost perfect” painting into a wild scribble of personal reflection, inspire by the feeling I’d gotten after seeing the crescent moon at the blue hour of a recent morning. I called the initial, geometrical version “dishonest” on Twitter, and when asked why I thought it was dishonest, I responded:
…art is play, scribbly, and a dance. I shouldn’t edit over the dance.
In other words, painting the scribble and transforming it into this geometrical, neat and orderly piece was like telling a great lie. And not only was I lying to my audience, but I was lying to myself.
I am not clean, orderly, or neat. I am a big scribbly mess of energy and I tend to run eople away before I can make friends with them because I’m just a bit….much. When my art is also a bit…much…my covering it up is almost like trying to hide my identity.
Intuitive art is not about hiding your identity.
Art, in general, is not about hiding your identity.
So I went back to the very root of why I create art in the first place: it’s fun. I like smearing paint on a canvas while dancing to Aurora and Harry Styles, so that was a good start. Art went back to being more about the process and less about the final result.
But it’s not always rainbows and butterflies and play. While January has apparently been a good month so far, by the looks of my scribbles, my work is not always fueled by joy and playfulness. Sometimes I’m in a shit mood and can only think about mass shootings and the dying planet. In the past I’ve often kept those negatively-fueled pieces to myself. But that, again, is another lie. Life is up and down and turned around and upside down and nonsense. So keep an eye out for the grumpy art too.
My newest scribbles are making their way onto my shop as they’re finished. Click here if you’d like to take a look. If you have any questions you can email me lina@linaforrester.com
Until next time, may your scribbles be scribbly and your identity be un-masked.
Let’s face it, we all live in our own happy bubble. Most of the time. We get used to what works and go with it, because why fix what ain’t broke? We get the same order from the coffee shop, cook the same meals, walk the same routes, wear the same outfits, talk to the same people, go to the same places on vacation.
And this isn’t just true with our normal day-to-day lives. As artists, we’ve also created our own creative bubbles. We choose the same color scheme, the same medium, the same surface, even the same spot next to the window to work. Same background music. Same subject matter. Same camera. Same brush.
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Those of you who follow my Instagram and Twitter know that I took a break over the weekend from the “business” side of things and instead traveled to St. Louis to visit the Van Gogh immersion exhibit. While there, we also visited the Gateway Arch and perused its underground museum. Getting out of the house and doing something brand new seemed to be just what I needed to get back into my creative flow. Before we even left for the two hour car ride, I was already scratching out landscapes with pastel pencils.
I continued these little landscapes off and on through the car ride to keep myself busy and also while waiting for our dinner. Goo even joined me in the sketching after we purchased her a sketchbook from the Van Gogh exhibit.
And speaking of the Van Gogh exhibit, could there be a cooler thing to experience? The whole first part of the exhibit was quotes from his letters to Theo and tidbits of history. The second part was a 35 minute long immersion experience, during which you could walk around or sit as Van Gogh’s work is projected all around you. Sometimes the paintings would move, portraits would blink, and his sunflowers would grow from behind paintings of wheat fields.
Goo loved the Japanese flowers and Starry Night, and my husband marveled at the night paintings, which had been animated slightly to show the water moving. I myself was in love with all of the self-portraits and admired each one. When we returned home that evening, Goo told us it was one of the best days of her life.
Since our St. Louis experience I’ve been binge-watching both Van Gogh and Monet documentaries. They are two of my creative heroes, and a lot of their philosophies about art, and life, make sense to me. During one of the Van Gogh documentaries, the narrator, who was being a voice for Van Gogh, said that after picking up oil painting: “I painted as I drew.” And something about that line clicked a gear into place.
I had been working with charcoals and pastels all weekend, scribbling and creating my little rocky landscapes, but what if I applied those same methods to watercolors? I decided to give it a go.
These are little paintings, around 5×7 inches, but I love the results so much I’ve already stretched out a large piece of hot press (approx 18×24) for a larger landscape “waterscribble.”
The methods are very similar, though with the waterscribbles I don’t actually “scribble” as that would ruin my brushes. But I do trail the color downward to create those same organic lines resembling roots. With watercolor I also don’t have the luxury of painting over dark colors with light colors as I would with dry media, but I do have the option to use ink or even gouache should I decide I want some lighter colors on top.
For these two pieces I used two separate palette boxes by Prima Watercolor Confections. The orange/red one was the Woodlands palette and the blues one is the Currents palette. For the blue one I also added a bit of copper-colored ink to give it an extra shimmer.
This past weekend has re-affirmed to me that taking a break can be so helpful in moving my career and/or my art forward. I’m hoping that this new boost in creative mojo will give me the energy I need to finally finish some larger work.
Until next time, may your creativity flow and your fun be immersive.
Scribble Chai 