This weeks posts are from Sue Stover! This is the sixth week in our collaborative exhibit share; in case you have missed  the previous I encourage you to take a look! Begin with Michelle Belto, follow on to Amanda Jolley, Crystal Neubauer, Erin Keane and Shary Bartlett. Enjoy!

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What’s worse than facing a blank canvas? Facing 7 of them. I’m going to be honest here. I’d like to say that when I started these I had all these wonderful, peaceful thoughts of Seven Degrees of Connection, how inspired I was by the colors, our interconnectedness, blah, blah. But seriously, all I could think of was, “Duh, what am I going to do? How am I going to get this done? I’ve only been working in blue and white for the last nine months, now I’m supposed to use color? Why did I pick these colors? Why are these panels this size? Do these jeans make my butt look big?“ And so on. This was a hard assignment. I tried a few things. They were awful. They were scraped off. I tried a few more. Not much better. One of the things I continually struggle with is, “Is this me? What is me? Am I staying true? Am I being influenced by ______ (whatever catches my eye that particular day). I want to do this project justice but everything is just not coming out. I don’t think I am alone in these types of struggles. I think that as artists we are hyper-influenced by all our senses.

Our motives and inspirations are stretched in every direction. It’s hard to focus. Or maybe it is just me. Just starting is sometimes the hardest part.