Mundane Moments
By Mason Gehring
March 22, 2021
I don’t know how many weeks it’s been but, I’m feeling like I’m coming up short for ideas to write about for this blog. Scraping the bottom of the idea barrel. It’s not that nothing is going on, it’s that nothing feels important enough to devote time writing about it.
I haven’t been able to paint recently because I have other projects going on and so there’s nothing new in my journey as an emerging artist. I have 3 large frames to stretch my canvas over and start my big adventure of painting really large again. It’s pretty intimidating but also very exciting.
Today, I met with Babs Reingold, my mentor and we discussed how to keep going as an artist you cannot be held up by the preciousness of an area or piece of a work that will hold you hostage to finishing the rest of the piece. I have been there and done that. I have accepted that I will have to paint out things that I love because they are impeding the progress of the rest of the piece. I call it kill the things you love. But I also hold in my head that if I’ve done it once, I can do it again. I feel like my practice as a painter has me painting enough that when something amazing happens it doesn’t mean it’s a fluke and can be created again. This doesn’t mean that amazing happy accidents don’t happen all the time never to be replicated but I just keep trying. As Dory says, “just keep swimming!” And so I do.
