Day Dreaming (18x26) by Carole Katchen
This painting was inspired by my recent trip to Taiwan. The model, the room and even the fruit are typical of the locale.
No artist can keep generating fresh, energetic images without an occasional break to refresh the senses. Yes, you can force yourself to keep producing paintings, but in time you’ll find you're only copying your successful paintings from the past, and then copying your copies. That's when it's time to wake up our senses by getting out of town.
I plan my life so that I can periodically travel abroad. During a recent two-month trip to Taiwan, I worked as an artist-in-residence at a university. A friend loaned me a bicycle so that I could explore the city, and the university gave me a studio where I could paint every day. The paintings I brought home were some of the strongest works I've ever done. My subjects were the same kinds of things I paint in America—people in restaurants, musicians, women gossiping—but there were subtle differences in the way I looked at space and how I arranged colors. I found myself much more aware of the surrounding sights, smells and sounds in an unfamiliar environment. All of those sensations helped produce my new work.
The next time you're bored with your art, don't force yourself to keep painting. Take some time off, even if only long enough to walk around a park or visit a farmers' market.
Try This at HomeE-mail your travel-inspired pastel painting (or paintings) to
pjedit@fwpubs.com (as a JPG image with a resolution of 72 dpi)
by April 30, 2008. (Type "Creative Spark" in the subject line.) The "editor's choice" will win $150 worth of PanPastel colors and tools. Include your name, e-mail and mailing address, plus a few words about your entry/entries.
Congratulations to
Marie Stanton Cardany, of Stuart, Fla., for her winning entry in our first Creative Spark challenge (
The Pastel Journal, December 2007 issue). Cardany won a 39-piece set of pastels from Great American Artworks. Go to our blog (
http://blog.pasteljournal.com) to see her letter-inspired painting.
Award-winning artist and author Carole Katchen's Creative Spark challenges appear in The Pastel Journal
. Learn more about her at www.carolekatchen.com.
