The Part I Don't Have to Explain
There's a splash of pink in this underpainting that has no business being there, and I put it there on purpose. Not because the corner needed warming up. Not because it made any sense next to what's around it. I put it there because the whole point of where I am right now is to stop being reasonable about it.
I'm in the very beginning stages of a new series. Nothing's finished. I just have ideas so far, and honestly that's the fun part. These first few stages are supposed to be totally improvisational and unexpected — that's the actual goal, not a byproduct. Which means I have to fight the urge to do the thing I would always do, because I have a way of doing things by now, fifteen years of it, and it's easy to let that take over without even noticing it happening.
So instead: a splash of pink where it doesn't belong. Colors that probably shouldn't go together, going right next to each other, just to see what happens when they do. I'm layering different bits and pieces on top of each other to see what they look like — and I already know most of that layering is going to disappear. It'll get painted over, or it'll just peek through at an edge somewhere, barely visible. That's fine. That's actually the point of it.
What I'm building right now is an underpainting that doesn't follow any specific process at all. No plan, no steps I could hand somebody else. And what that's actually doing for me is keeping me from getting too tight — too careful, too much "I already know how this goes." One thing that feels important about this particular stage: I get to do it without thinking about how I would teach it to somebody else. For a long time, teaching was basically baked into how I made anything — I was half-narrating it while I worked, turning whatever I was doing into something explainable.
This doesn't have to be explainable to anyone. I just get to let the work speak to me. If it tells me it wants a splash of something in the corner, I go with it. I don't have to stop and extrapolate a reason for it. I can just follow it and actually sink into flow, instead of hovering above it deciding whether any of it makes sense.
I don't know yet what this turns into. I'm just trying to stay improvisational and unexpected instead of doing what I always do.
If you're on Instagram this week, you'll probably catch pieces of it — the parts that happen to be photogenic before they're finished. And if you want the version even less resolved than that, the kind of thing that never quite makes it into a caption, that's what Studies from the Studio is for.
I'm also pulling clothes out for Provence right now — I leave in a little over a week. Fall weather, vineyards, nothing scheduled beyond wandering. That's usually when the best stuff finds me anyway.
Back next week with whatever the pink turned into.
— Shelby
