Wherein a Mysterious Girl Throws Me a Lifeline by Just Showing Up

Whether it is the dreadful cold and gray of winter, the busy busy busy of distracting daily errands, a touch of depression, seemingly endless migraines, or just a routine fallow period, I've been mired in creative block so thick and deep, it feels like I'm up to my neck in quicksand.  I've been able to keep up with my "daily diary"/Full Tilt Boogie journal but other than that, my creative life has generally ground to a halt.

Remember this canvas?  I've been tinkering with it for almost a year, blogging about it here and then here.  This weekend, I puttered around with it some more and finally felt like the background was "done" and perhaps even on the verge of being overworked.  Anyway, I decided that I wanted to paint something on top of it and for about seven hours, I got no farther than that thought.  

I shuffled through my collage images.  I cleaned my studio table.  I glued some paper into a journal and then cleaned my studio table again.  I still had no burst of brilliant inspiration.  Sometimes I try to engage my muse with some playful art exercises but just as often, I just sit and wait...and wait...and wait.

Finally, around eight o'clock in the evening, I decided to try painting a face.  Now I am not very good at painting faces and I am always deeply dissatisfied with the results but I pushed ahead, knowing I would hate the results but happy just to feel like painting. 

This is the face that emerged and I thought I'd share a picture here before I gesso over it.  The head is oddly tilted and the complexion verges on sickly but this face calls to me a little bit.  I see my own melancholy and pensive self looking back at me.  And she does look a lot like a story character I've been meditating on for almost a decade.  So even though her presence will be ephemeral, this lady served a purpose.  Her visage emerged from the end of my brush to remind to keep moving for the shore, no matter how deep the quicksand and how tiring the struggle.