madelyn hamilton

A new year of upcoming adventure!      I very much enjoy the beginning of a new year, for I have found it makes me pause and wonder as to ‘what comes next’?  I welcome challenges, which are good for the brain and adrenalin surges.  My art is always a challenge.  Ideas are not the difficult part, but rather, how to express them in continuously changing or differing ways?  It is easy to become complacent and do the familiar. 

But I find that currently I’m particularly restless and in change mode. That is why I want a ‘no show agenda’ for a while to come, allowing me immersion and full focus within my studio space.   I want to gain a difference in my brush strokes.  I want to use transparency, a skill that is not easily learned, for it requires drying time, patience and repetition.  The ‘patience’ requirement is a skill I am short on.  And then, how to make that subject matter look not as I’ve done it, but rather with creation of new perspectives,  or by a change in and use of familiar colour schemes.  Colours.  There, always, is the big challenge.  The colour plan needs to be initially thought out, for as much as one can do that.  Most critical however, is the tentative and rough planning of the initial design or ‘bones’  of the layout.  One had best have this figured  beforehand, or big struggle will ensue.

Finally though, and most important as I see it, is the understanding that ‘the sale’ is not key to true and meaningful art.  The idea of selling should not be foremost in the mind and soul.   I find it interruptive, for it is not my reason for expressing personal aesthetics and concerns.  If it does happen, then good, …for the making of  art is expensive.  It also means another person finds deep pleasure in the sum expression of your own personal marks.  I am looking forward to a new year of altering familiar habits.