When you’re an artist, you have lots of time to contemplate your processes in life. The best example I can give you is through a question: Is the real process of creativity a natural phenomena or can it be learned and influenced?

The thing is, we use words and phrases like talent, innate ability, natural ability hereditary etc, etc…. We also decide that certain things are unable to be achieved based on family history, fear of the unknown and fear of failure without having tried them.

Here’s a big one: “oh no, I can’t do that, it just doesn’t come naturally to me”

My point is, we carry so many constructs and conditions in our lives that we limit our discovery of new things. We artists are no different from anyone else.

I have created thousands of pieces of art over the years and have found that some of the same things still plague the outcome of my most inspired work. I am an intuitive painter, so when something isn’t right, I know it, but I don’t always know exactly what IT is.

Here is a phrase: “do what comes naturally”!

I have pride myself on that one little phrase and I really didn’t know what it meant, what it REALLY meant.

What comes natural is available to us all and it only happens when we let go of potential outcomes and fears. My shift happened when I started trusting my own process and I stopped trying to think through or fight my natural inclinations to do something I had not attempted before—a simple and truly challenging shift to make.

Moving forward, I still don’t know what is good or bad about my art, I just know it sort of falls out of me and perpetuates my need to create more. It has been less than 18 months since I started painting full time and I now have around 60 paintings from my Urban Culture series and well over 400 drawings. Online interviews and exhibitions and promotions of my work keep appearing and more paintings are on there way.

The local exhibition season is almost upon us so if you want to stay in the loop, I would like to invite you to join my monthly newsletter by going to grudart.ca and hit subscribe.