The Bridge

There are two versions of artist me that show up to the studio and I have been trying to figure out how they work together for years.

The first one arrives with a plan. She has been collecting images for weeks, pulling colors, pinning rooms she wants her work to live in someday. She builds a wall. Literally: images arranged and rearranged until something clicks, until a palette comes together, until she can almost see the painting before she makes it. This version of me is a direct inheritance from twenty years in corporate creative rooms. Organized, methodical, planful.

The second one shows up with nothing and stands in front of a blank canvas and waits. Sometimes something comes. More often, nothing comes and she starts painting anyway, layering and covering and changing direction, chasing something she cannot quite name. This version can make the best thing I have ever made. She can also spend an entire afternoon going nowhere and have nothing to show for it but paint on a palette. She is messier.

Somewhere in between these two, I think, is where the most honest work lives.

Learning to move between them is my most important work as an artist. It is the daily practice that is always happening in the background, in my brain and my sketchbooks, long before I ever step up to a blank canvas.

The messier, freer version gets stuck quite often. Paralyzed by a mix of self-doubt, fear, and too much thinking. The more structured version gets stuck differently, too many ideas and inputs piling up with nowhere to go, no clear way in. What I am learning is that the answer is not to choose between them but to let them work together. To use the wall-building, the sketchbook keeping, the collage making, the small color studies and watercolor grids as the bridge. Inspiration given shape. Vision made clear enough to actually walk toward.

Underneath all of it, the thing I keep having to learn: this is an act of faith more than anything else. The belief that if I keep showing up and keep making things, no matter how big or small or good or bad I think they are in the moment, I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. I do believe that. I have to remind myself of it almost every day when the doubt comes in, which it does, reliably. But I think that is just the life of an artist. You show up. You make the thing. And by doing it, over and over, you get to call yourself one.

If this landed with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who would get it. A friend who makes things, a designer you admire, someone who has a complicated relationship with their own blank canvas. Word of mouth is everything for a solo artist and I do not take it for granted.

And if you have been thinking about bringing a painting into your home or a project you are working on, my studio is open for commissions. I would love to make something with you. Reach me at jill@colorkindstudio.com and we can start there.

So glad you are here. xx