The Cleveland painter Michelle Muldrow was a musician for ten years before becoming a painter — although she got a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) before that. From an unusual background, an unusual creative process:
Interviewer: Describe your working process when creating a new work.
MM: Usually I begin reading about environmental issues, urban development, really anything touching on the subjects of land use, as well American history and fiction. I guess I sort of consider myself a sponge at the beginning stages of work, then usually some travel helps and I take tons of source photos. From there I organize my photos into different obsessions, be it the artificial horticulture and landscaping in the modern developments, or the death of inner ring suburbs, subdivisions, etc, at that point I look for what I am most interested in painting. It’s sort of like all my intellectual obsessions still must go through a filter of how I feel, and that is an important element to my work- nostalgia. I suppose I attribute that to the rootlessness of my childhood, I am always trying to make sense of my landscape and home. Then I begin the body of my work. I tend to approach my work as a series or body rather than as individual images. I always prep, underpaint and paint at least 4-5 paintings all at once, never one at a time. I freehand draw, then do a monochromatic underpainting, and from there, I paint.
Painting, in other words, resembles blogging: You can blog about anything, you can paint anything — so long as you care about it.
One of her favorite writers is Jane Jacobs. She used to live in San Francisco, where there seemed to be no upper limit on the value of property. In Cleveland, with boarded-up homes everywhere, there seems to be no lower limit.
Interesting. Maybe you are thinking that painting and writing are “large” while blogging is “small”. What I was thinking is that painting and blogging are activities that inherently involve a lot of emotion. Writing may or may not. Do newspaper writers care a lot about their assigned topics? Often not. Do technical writers care a lot about the stuff they write? Probably not. Is there emotion behind every letter? No, a lot of letters are purely functional. Behind every blog post? I think so, unless it’s a job.
No, I’m just saying that blogging is a say of publishing. Writing is the creative activity, blogging is the medium.
But your last comment reminds me of something I recently noticed about applied research and teaching, which I’ll blog about sometime soon when I have a moment.