Exercises in Patience

As we all are, I've been trying to be patient and keep busy enough to not go stir-crazy, but still give myself time to mentally process this pandemic we're all in. Most of my days consist of not knowing where the time goes, but some days I feel super productive and am able to create art. For the last couple years I've been feeling listless about creating art. Some of which was connected to my own perfectionism and wanting everything I made to serve some purpose before I even tried to make it. Another aspect was this journey I've been on to decrease the amount of material things I have, buy, and produce; it can be hard to feel good about making art when it just feels like another object that just exists. I realized early in quarantine, though, that I have all these creative materials sitting around my house, so whether it's a fully developed piece or pieces of material, it's still taking up space. I've been spending the past month or so, creating a few old project ideas that I just never sat down to do(I don't paint sitting down, though). Most of them are mainly aesthetic or just ideas of a certain process being interesting.

For years, I was saving these plastic birth control packets that they gave me every month. I always knew I wanted to do something with them, but was unsure of what. Then I realized they could make interesting spray paint stencils. I must admit my original idea was totally different than what came out. I originally thought I wanted to make black and white images with a few pops of color or mixed media added to it. When it came down to finally putting these together and testing the packets, I realized I didn't have any black spray paint. Not wanting to go to the store just for that, plus wanting to use what materials I already had available, I ended up creating very colorful patterned images that create composition and movement from these varied color schemes:

Spray Birth 1 & 2: spray paint on gessoed wood 16"x20" $150/each

After creating these, a friend asked if I could make a bigger variation with a galaxy color scheme for her home. Because the packets are a fairly small size, I decided to create some bigger symmetrical, mandala-like stencils to fill up the space better. I'm really happy with how all three turned out.

Concentrate on Space: spray paint on gessoed wood 36"x36" for Ami Robinson