Putting Demons to Rest
On my desk - paints and brushes back where they belong next to my painting in process
It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally put my demons to rest. All of us have some kind of blockage to grapple with in our lives, to a greater or lesser degree. It’s what holds us back from reaching or even dreaming about reaching our full potential. Facing that is part of the process of healing.
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of when my life took a left turn. I was in my final year of high school and not coping so well. My parents took me to Tasmania for a holiday. Fifty years later I was in my art residency in Oatlands and I realised how circular life is. Visiting Tasmania was a pivotal point in my life, both then and now.
This is what happened. When I was 17 I took a little instamatic camera with me on my holiday to Tasmania. We visited all the usual tourist places which I took photos of and showed off to my art class on my return home.
My art teacher made the snap decision to switch me mid year from painting to photography. I had to learn to shoot with a SLR 35mm camera, develop the film and print in a darkroom, all within a month or two.
Needless to say I loved the magic of seeing my prints develop in the tray. The side effect was I felt that I could no longer paint. That I was not good enough. That I would never be an artist. So I thought I would become a photojournalist. However newspapers of that time said they didn’t employ women photographers. So I became a journalist instead.
Without access to a darkroom, my photography slipped away and I became busy with all the other parts of living - jobs, relationships, travel, children and homemaking. In amongst it all I tried to keep my creativity alive through community projects; theatre, writing and filmaking.
It wasn’t until I was nearly fifty that I finally went to art school at TAFE via printmaking. Painting and drawing still terrified me, especially life drawing. My first paintings from that time were graffiti type words scrawled onto corrugated iron, almost angry outpourings of frustration. I kept trying to paint but was again put off by another teacher saying my work would possibly fit into ‘folk genre’. As in not good enough. I put away my brushes, forever I thought.
Until last month in Oatlands when I decided to explore ink drawing on large paper. Technically speaking it wasn’t ‘painting’. I loved making lines and marks with ink and mud. I added a couple of colours to the mix and got excited with the results. I returned home after my four week residency with rolls of painted papers and the confidence that comes with feeling happy with what I had created.
Fast forward to this week when I went out and bought a canvas. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve, as I had practised already at the residency. It was a landscape viewed through windows, the curated landscape I wrote about in a previous blogpost.
Here were the cleared paddocks, the stone walls, the farmed acres viewed from the warmth inside a sandstone house complete with peeling wallpapers. A view through colonial windows from a post colonial viewpoint. My brushes and paints took pride of place on my studio bench. I even got out my easel!
I blessed those demons which had brought me to this point and finally put them to rest. I have arrived, who knows what’s next.
Work in Progress. On my easel the beginnings of a new work inspired by my time at Oatlands
