My Habitual Mid-Painting Freak Out

 Ok, it's here. My mid-painting "Freak Out" has arrived. This is the point where I am halfway through with the silk painting and I HATE it. I hate everything about it and the VOICE in my head convinces me that I am a total fraud and don't have an ounce of artistic ability in my body. "What the hell made me think I could pull this painting off" it screams in my head. I am not kidding about this folks, I literally get nauseous, anxious, and bewildered at how the painting can be coming out so badly. AND this lovely roller coaster of emotions happens with almost every painting I do!!!!!

Yup I am an artistic basket case at the mid-painting point, and sometimes it lasts up until the painting has left the studio and is in some distant gallery. I even called a gallery manager once and told him I had made a mistake sending him the painting and asked him to remove it from the gallery wall. He politely talked me down from my fevered painting-hating-hysteria and the painting sold within 2 weeks. It is also one of my top selling prints. So there VOICE, take that!

Whenever Don walks into the studio at the mid-painting point, like he did today, he says "Hows it going?" and I respond with something like "It is coming out awful, nothing works, it is a disaster, I'm freaking out, what am I going to do??!!!" He then says, "Oh good, so things are progressing as usual." Then I counter with words that I don't even think my spell checker will let me type here but you get the idea.


So anyway here I am mid-painting, freaking out as usual. I decided to walk away for a while, take a break and take some photos of it to get some distance and perspective. Because my paintings are created with dyes on silk any corrections are pretty much impossible but often some distance calms me down enough that I can at least resume working on the darn thing again.

Oh how I long to finish these two paintings and get back to playing with screen printing, block printing and discharging art cloth.....now that is FUN!!!!!!!

OK, back to work, deep breaths.......breathing in I love my painting.....breathing out I love my painting......Ohmmmmmm..........