Why Do I Take Long Pauses While Painting?

Hear me out here. When I need to express myself I really need to kick it out. Obsessively. I can stay days, weeks or months without painting, but once that moment, that need, that thirst, kicks out, a gestational waiting is ready to burst. I can spend days and hours without thinking about anything else than painting, and when I do it, I think about anything but painting.

Abstract painting under the sun while in my hometown in Italy, Solanas, Sardinia

Once everything has been kicked out, I feel good and empty. It is a great feeling. I feel exhausted, and happy. I don’t need to continue for a while. I like the feeling of being gratified and start doing something else, whether is business related or any other things. I feel if I would continue painting, I wouldn’t progress. I would keep repeating the same patterns, without any new ideas or innovations. Painters do paint in series, most of the times. Often, repeating themselves, without exiting those patterns. If I’d be caught up in one, I would probably have problems exiting it. Reason why I take long breaks.

Taking long breaks (from few months up to a year) encourages me to free my mind and start with a fresh mind. I’m a self-thought part time artist, and I have other things besides painting, although nothing brings me to life like painting. With a fresh mind, I’m always encouraged to start something new. I’ve changed my style several times throughout the years, and this came always naturally, and through long breaks. For instance, I only recently started doing abstract paintings, and I’ve done nothing else during the summer of 2018, both in Helsinki, where I live, and on vacation on my home town in Italy.

I loved my last five weeks over there: like, enjoying the slow life, the weather, the wine, my daughter growing up and playing with her grandparents in the veranda, and taking life easily. I’ve got a bunch of oil paintings laying down in there for years, which I touch and finish slowly. Like picking up a painting every two/three years, for perhaps a day. And never seeing it for a while, might be one or two years, depending on the time. That is slow painting, and that is how some of my best paintings have been made: just by forgetting them. Picking them up after months and months, and discovering them like they’ve never existed before. I’ve got a bunch of rolled up old canvases, mostly ruined, which I picked up again especially last summer, playing around and doing abstracts. Tell you what: some of the best paintings I’ve ever done, according to my pace: quick, immediate, without thinking too much. Mostly pour and swipe oils with some dripping, and out there in the sun, laying them down to dry without caring for heat, insects flying over the tint or whatnot, that’s how I feel about painting: simple and direct, no bullshits.

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