The Joyous Struggle

"Joyous Struggle" 24 X 38 Mixed Media on Canvas

Do you ever feel that while you are working on your art, the art is working on you?  It's a strange and wondrous thing to see how threads of things going on around you, within you becomes part of the process of creating.  How many times have I thought I was done, until I step back and take the long look that leads me back into the painting and the next step that I hope will bring completion.


"Joyous Struggle," I don't know how to express it more precisely, but that defines the creative process for me.  My sister and I, Kellie, have been talking a lot about the creative bent within us and our personal struggle to 'value' it, to see it's worth in this world.  Kel's been going through some difficult life transitions, the kind that make you take a long hard look at who you truly are, what fuels your tank.  We were rather odd ducks in our family nucleus, quiet and absorbed in the world of our imaginations.  Work never stopped on the family farm, so practical and pragmatic were the watchwords.  Truth be told, little value is put on the artistic in the world we occupy.


Something artist/author Makoto Fujimura wrote in 'A Letter to Young Artists' echoed the things Kel and I had been discussing:

"Remember your first love—how much you enjoyed creating as a child. If you ever lose that sense of joy, you will need to reflect on why you lost that spark... the craft of expression takes much “dying to self” and much discipline. A discipline of any form takes perseverance. But when we are going through a period of training, we must remember the reason for our training. Our journey needs to have a specific direction. Our direction need not be toward being successful and being famous. We need to start from your first love; what we cherish, what we are, and what we value.

There will be a quiet joy even within that wrestling.“But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so…The lumps on the shoulders…may even give it an awkward appearance.” C.S. Lewis

Have you ever felt awkward, and felt the “lumps”? If you are an artist, perhaps you began your journey realizing that you are different from others. We have gotten used to having these “lumps” and accepted the fact that to the world the “lumps” look strange and unnatural. Your teachers and your friends may not fully understand your intuition to try to fly with your winged “lumps.” What if Lewis is right, and you are destined to “fly”? What if our awkwardness, and our uniqueness points to the potential of the person we are meant to become? In order to learn to fly, you need to be patient, and ready to experience many failures; we need an environment where we can fail often, but you also need opportunities to peer into the wonders and mysteries of the vista of the world to come." Mako Fujimura

He expresses it so beautifully and served to be one more thread woven into this joyous struggle of finding and expressing that part of me that has long been missing and is only now coming to light. The hardest thing my sister and I had to face was by saying that our artistic side held little value in the world, we in effect we saying a huge portion of ourselves had no value. I suspect we are not alone :-)