I love these funny fancy parlours. I love that they are lopsided, imperfect and a hodge podge of my imagination and reality. Objects from my living room, my childhood mixed together with my wouldn’t it be great list. In reality, do I live with aqua walls and kelly green velvet couches? No. But I would! If I could! And I should!
I also love doing them because they rarely (never) go the way I plan or want and take on a wily life of their own and challenge me in a way no other pieces do. Explaining and expressing the artistic process is a bit like writing down a recipe you’ve made a thousand times from your head…it just “is” but if I could, I’d say that capturing these rooms is a combination of herding cats and following breadcrumbs. Not the kind of assignment I volunteer for but somehow the kind that I’m hardwired to receive. Here Mindy, this will be like wrestling an alligator. But you’ll love it! Really!
Because I am self-taught, that is where the alligator comes in. I have no background in theory or depth or scale or any other technical painting processes that gives artists skill or recognizable work. I go in. That is my method. And I figure it out as I go. What does a chair look like sideways? Well, certainly not like the four times I painted it before the one you see here. Painting is a great reminder that most of us come with an artistic visual library of house, square, sun, circle, roof, triangle, bodies, stick, two stick, two more sticks and maybe some squiggles for hair. And by painting, I must unlearn this knowledge. Suns are not yellow, they are a million shades of orange and red and brown. People are not sticks, houses have angles and contours and rooms have depth and scale. And every single time, every time, I relearn and am astounded how little I know, how much I have to learn, how much I want to learn and how much I love the whole damn process. And best of all, how much I’m ok with being lopsided and imperfect. In life and in painting. Our wobbly edges are the fanciest parts. xo