Last week I came across some videos by a female artist, Louise Fletcher, who was really interesting to me because she described exactly the cycle I've gone through repeatedly. You initially begin very inspired, creating intuitively... all by feeling. And by stepping outside your comfort zone into new territory, some great results emerge. But because you're jazzed by the results, you make the mistake of focusing on achieving other, specific results, and thereby eliminate the element of the unknown - the surprise... and the magic is gone. Unknowingly, you've killed the creative process. Louise offers a program that focuses on the creative process itself - and for the duration of the course - ignoring the results.
I first joined an online community called Art Tribe that gives you access to a ton of resources, videos, demos, info - and it appeals to me more than any I’ve tried before. The other is a one-week free ‘taster’ for a longer course called Find Your Joy, an intensive 12-week workshop focusing on the creative process.
In Art Tribe I discovered a movement coined "Disrupted Realism", and realized that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to achieve in my recent work - the feeling of dreams, memories, a fleeting image from a dream or the sense of a past reality disrupting one's present day experience. I’d ideally wanted to create this feeling in my Arles painting and several recent drawings and was thrilled to find it had a name. So I decided to try a self portrait in that style.