Directions

Featured image: Direction

Does your art have direction? Does your life have direction? Do you have direction? If you are missing directions to the latter two questions, there is no way you can give direction to your art.

Several years ago my art gained direction. Instead of just hoping things would happen to my work, I took reflection on my work and found that if I wanted my work to represent something to have direction.

I began to incorporate things that I believe in, things I feel strongly about such as the unique individual.

Things aren’t always as easy as saying, “I am going to give direction to my work.” So, I began to call myself a conceptual abstract artist. I defined myself and my work as being abstract but with an idea within the work. What I found out was that the concept in the work took over the work and the visual language of the actual work got lost. And the uniqueness of the work itself faded.

What was missing? Freedom. It took a long time to give the concept direction and allow the image to also have direction. Both had to be from me, not someone else. Most recently I looked up the concept/ definition of the word, paradox, online. Then as I begin to think and write about it, uniqueness returned to my work, to me and to the concept in the work.