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.
Scribble Chai 