Sometimes I'm a painter...
Writer's block and making art anyway
I think I’ve secretly had writer’s block since my first book came out more than 5 years ago. I’ve found it hard to become infatuated with a new project, to really lose myself in the writing the way I did while working on Feasting Wild.
Some days I wonder if I can call myself a writer if writing no longer brings me the almost manic joy it once did? If I’m not actively working on another book? If I have forgotten how to do this thing that once came so easily? Maybe I was a one-hit wonder, I wonder in the middle of the night.
Identity is funny like that.
I have always considered myself to be a creative person. Not a creative, in the over-capitalized, marketing lingo way, a label that seems to be attached to anyone doing anything online. But as someone who creates because of a deep need to make things. To tinker and fix and establish. Whether its sewing or cooking or renovating a house, I feel the urge to create almost daily
When I was working on Feasting Wild, I taught myself to oil paint. I was living with my aunt and uncle in Manhattan and had an art studio in Brooklyn. I would take the subway there in the morning and write for the first half of the day. Then in the afternoons, if I got my work done, I’d let myself paint. I had a long history of going out into nature and making little watercolors, so it didn’t surprise me that the forms coming off my brush were a bit like those landscapes, influenced by cityscapes instead of the mountains of New Mexico.
I was delighted by how much painting helped me to clarify what I wanted to write. The book and the paintings seemed to be the same world, just different twisted versions, separated by space or time or quantum field. In the mornings, I inhabited a strange and beautiful book all about wild animals and disappearing ecologies, and a love affair with an elusive Swedish man. In the afternoons, I explored psychedelic terrains, with weird forests and unreal waterfalls.
As the book progressed, and my comfort with oils grew, painting became a treat and a motivator. Finish editing this chapter, I would tell myself, and you can be with your canvases for the rest of the day.
After I left NYC, I didn’t oil paint again for almost 5 years.
Recently, I’ve felt the familiar urge to paint again. I’m hoping if I start making pictures, that a new book will emerge and take hold, that I will rekindle the joint flames of writing and painting together.
So I have decided to create 50 watercolor postcards this winter season.
These postcards are little poems, visual prayers, intuitive transmissions from wherever the creative spirit lives.
And I want to share these postcards with you.
They will be for sale here on my website or you can send me a venmo (or paypal) with your address in the notes—sliding scale $25 - $125. If you feel like you could benefit from a postcard and don’t have the money, reach out and I will send you one for free.
Once I receive an order, I will sit quietly, emptying my mind, and then let the paint and water and paper do what it will, creating whatever image wishes to come through.
The postcard you receive will thus be a surprise made specifically for you!
The back will be blank, so you can write a note and send it to someone you love, if you so wish. Or I am happy to send them directly to people as gifts, with whatever message you’d like written on the back.
Can I call myself a painter if no one buys my art? Yes absolutely. But it will much more fun if I send them out far and wide, to have a life of their own.
Love always,
Gina Rae
