Climbing the mountain or getting lost in the jungle, with art.
Recently a TikTok I created went viral. Well as “viral” as anything I have posted yet has. This video surpassed my usual 200 or so views and is currently climbing to 26,000 views with nearly 5000 likes. The short video essentially documents where I started merging my abstract figurative work with my realism work. New eyes were on my art practice and I had just started a new painting that, whilst it still combined these two styles, the concept involved considerably more realistically painted elements in a surrealist landscape, with the abstract figure comparative small in the centre. I’ve been working on this painting for over a month now and it will still be some time before I can finish the abstract figure in the paintings centre. I wondered if new audiences would think that I no longer paint in the same manner that attracted them to my page in the first place.
LEFT: Sitting in front of the new painting in progress ‘A full mind’. Oil on canvas.
This scenario had me thinking about a situation artists who lean into the boundaries of their art practice and pursue creative exploration find themselves in. And as I can describe it, it’s the sensation of wandering whether you are climbing the mountain of your art practice, taking your creativity to new heights and your art career to higher visibility, OR whether you are getting lost in the jungle, dilluting your brand and your message and are in danger of sinking into quicksand and disappearing into a confusing knot of vines.
There’s also the possibility that it’s both. Getting lost in the jungle is the way up the mountain and maybe it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that the oeuvre of famed artists and the development of their distinctive styles make sense.
I am not sure where I read it, but I had this quote jotted down in a notebook and turned it into an affirmation card that I recite reguarly:
“When you study the works of masters you discover that for the most part they were just documenting their own growth”
What I get from this quote is that mastery isn’t a static assertion of genius - mastery is curiosity and hunger for continual growth.
Whilst I look back on the first decade or so of adult life and how chaotic it might appear with my various interests and career pursuits (visual merchandising in interiors, modelling, acting, graphic design, installation art, video art, graffiti, fashion illustration, painting, mixed media etc) now I can look back on all those experiences and see how they influence the work I create today. What was once messy is now makes sense.
Perhaps the only way we’ll know whether we’re climbing the mountain is whether we’re leaning into the discomfort and going upwards (you’ll feel it in your hamstrings).
That’s it for this little Art musing! If you’re on the platform and you are so inclined you can follow me on TikTok. My username on both Instagram and Tiktok is @cynthiahoward_art
xx Cynthia
