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This post has been a really long time coming. I struggled with how much I wanted to reveal here, and how long to make this post. Or if any of this was relevant. There's a fuckton of stuff that I write in here but shit who even reads this blog? Maybe one loyal, consistent reader (Hey Antoinette!!). Well, this post will be a slight deviation from art-talk and will get a little personal. If you follow me at all, maybe you've noticed that I've been away for a while, only poking my head out here and there. I think it's been about 6 months at least. During this time I have barely done any painting at all, by choice. It was a strange yet necessary shift. However I think that now I'm ready to start creating and sharing again.Now that we're well into 2018, I think that I can say that I'm finally done with sorting through the aftermaths of my movements in 2017. It was a year of extreme highs and lows in my art life and my personal life. Some of which I mentioned casually here and there in my art vlog. Once I returned from my artist residency over the summer, the last few months of the year ended up being a slow realization that I needed to take a breather. I needed a break from making art in general, and making art from certain emotions. I definitely needed a break from people. I also needed a break from the mindset that my art needed to take me somewhere, or that every piece that I did needed to count. Perhaps somewhere along the way there was an expectation that had I attached to my art-making that made the experience stressful and deterred me from creating. Perhaps it was simply burn-out. Looking back I think that it may have started with experiencing huge disappointments and setbacks from my residency. Then there was the exhaustion from two cross-country roadtrips within 6 weeks. Then I was sent over the edge by the mental and emotional suck of a heart re-broken immediately upon my return home. All of those things left me confused, frustrated, isolated and depressed - and that was just the tip of it. I was hit by a breadth of hurt feelings that were on borrowed time, before having to quickly internalize it all again and shove on. It's a struggle because in my mind, I can't afford to show a weakness, or be too emotional or, shudder to think, angry. "Strength," even if it's false, is what I have to cling to. There are no safety nets for me here. Life was presenting itself to me in a way that prompted me to question everything that I was doing, from my artwork to my personal relationships. I had finally hit a wall and couldn't rebuild the momentum. So, reluctantly, I took a step back from it all.For the last 5 years, a large part of my life was about grinding, producing, trying to achieve a certain ratio of input:output. But then I just couldn't anymore. I physically could NOT. The ideas were there, but my morale was on "E." I wasn't sure how long I needed to be off, I just knew that I couldn't create anything. I wanted to give up, to just stop doing art. I constantly questioned what it was all for and lamented that I didn't seem to be getting any closer to what the "next level" was for me. It was the darkest place that I had to navigate through in a long time. Fellow creative friends supported the decision to chill and regroup, telling me that it was not worth quitting. Telling me that I was too talented to stop, and shit like that. Suggesting that what I was feeling was most likely burnout and that I should redirect my efforts for a while, then see how I feel about painting. I didn't even know if whatever they said was true but I was so, so tired and discouraged. A hiatus was going to happen regardless, for lack of any other options.What ended up happening during this break was a lot of reflection and a lot of straight chillin. Eventually I was inspired enough to sit down and take inventory of the creative ideas and pursuits that still interested me. I was surprised that there was quite a lot that I wanted to do...at some point. I was still a long way off from executing anything at the time. It took me a while to actually relax and allow myself to be ok with not creating anything for a while. Sometimes we may find ourselves conditioned to think that any day without work or progress is a day wasted - which is not always true. My time off ended up being something like a "recharge." I can't speak to how beneficial it is to force oneself to work or be creative no matter what, though maybe I should try that sometime - I might get a lot more work done. What I do know is that stepping away periodically can have the effect of re-motivating a person to continue. Or it could be the palate-cleansing act that leads one to conclude that they should move on to something else. Sheeeit, it was almost the latter for me! I was feeling so defeated that I was about ready to quit art altogether. It was as if I was doing so much without really getting anywhere, and having no foresight about when things could or would get better. Of course, most artists know that that's a part of what we sign up for, but that doesn't make it easier unfortunately. During the break I found myself naturally being creative regardless of how worn-out I felt. It wasn't anything too heavy, and I refrained from painting the whole time. I started playing around with some greeting card designs:
For a little while I was running a weird Instagram page where I make crude drawings, mostly by random requests (I need to start doing that again, I really fell off). This drawing was requested by a stranger:
I also started up an artist podcast, Art Life Confidential, where I share tips and topics pertaining to pursuing your creative goals post-college. This was a project that I'd been meaning to get off the ground for a while. Unfortunately, I've fallen behind on that too! Now that I'm trying to get back into a painting routine, it's been a struggle to accommodate all of the new things that I started while on my brain break. There never seems to be enough hours in the day. Self-discipline and self-motivation can be tough habits to form, and I took a risk by breaking my streak. From this point I'm just hoping that I can get it all back to where I need to be.
And of course, there's my art vlog (Traci L. Turner Art on YouTube) and all of my other spaces around the internet, including this site and blog. I've been able to sort of keep up with making videos at least, though now I've decided to post on a monthly schedule. Since things have slowed down for me and I've been trying to initiate a shift in direction with my art career, it didn't make sense to me anymore to commit to a weekly or bi-weekly posting schedule. There wasn't much to talk about, and I really just didn't want to be seen. So I've been going with that feeling in just about every other aspect of my online representation. I'm falling back and minimizing everything. There seems to be so much pressure for us to try to find ways to stay in people's faces and constantly post things in an effort to cling to whatever little relevancy that we think we have. Sure it may be effective for some people or in certain circumstances, but I didn't want to feel like I had to keep subscribing to that. Not when it comes to presenting myself, or my artwork. Where everything that I do has to be traced back to a "brand" or some sort of carefully curated presence or idea of me. There's no tone or image that I'm trying to project. Fuck outta here with alldat. My real life is not a fuckin mood board, so I don't want my movements online to appear that way either. Of course, there's a balance in sharing things with the public. I am in no way saying that I'm about to start getting extremely transparent! I'll probably never be that person. I just mean that I decided that it's not important to me anymore to share things online for social media clout or attention, or even to be "discovered." If any of that happens on its own, then cool. I'll roll with it. At this point whatever I share, however I decide to share it, will be solely because I want to, for self-expression, and to share with those who genuinely care about what I'm up to in life. So yeah, cleaning up my online imprint was another thing that I decided to work on improving as well.Shit, I think I might be taking that same fallback approach in my personal life too. It seems like with each year that passes I find myself pulling back more and more. These days I think it's becoming more obvious to me that I'm a much different version of myself than I was 5 years ago. I do a lot more watching and waiting. I'm not as open and happy-go-lucky as I once was. The range of emotions that I allow myself to share with others has narrowed significantly. The fact that I'm even trying to assume that much control over something like that is a huge change as well. All of which could probably be traced to being emotionally and spiritually worn the fuck out. If there was a way for me to describe the shift, I guess I'd say that I've retained the core of who I am but I'm much more subdued, and I practice a hell of a lot more compartmentalization. I'm sure compartmentalizing is to be expected once one reaches a certain point in life, but the degree of which I see myself doing it surprises me sometimes. There are so many divides and categories: in my friendships, at my job, in my free time and even between myself and my artwork. All of this reminds me of an old blog post that I did here a few years ago, where I first decided to publicly acknowledge the shift that I noticed within myself. Since then, I often wonder if what I've been experiencing over the last few years is the slow and painful realization of the depth of my naïveté. Many harsh truths have been revealed to me or had to be relearned, and I certainly feel worse for wear. I'm willing to admit that maybe some of this more methodical approach to life is partially in reaction to some of these "lessons," perhaps even an extreme reaction in some cases. At any rate, all of that shit came to a head, along with everything else I described earlier in this post, at about the same damn time and I've been trying my best to regroup ever since. I want to believe that things are in a better place than 6 months ago, but it's honestly hard to tell sometimes.At least the art stuff is slowly moving along and coming around again I guess - it's literally all that I have. I'll try my best to check back in on here more regularly and to share pictures as I complete projects and add things to the site. In the meantime, please feel free to hit me up! The comments section is always open and I love to hear your thoughts. If you need a refresher, get caught up on my previous posts on this blog and/or check for me in all of my other online spaces:
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