Emotionally Charged

Stress inhibits creativity - David Lynch

So true. With the multitude of goings on in daily life, sometimes it's an absolute trial to focus and get into work.
It seems counter-productive on the surface to instead go and do something to restore my spirits, but the fact is, if I don't go play and get into that frame of mind, the art will suffer. And suffer, and suffer.

I'm a very emotionally-based artist - I source my imagery directly from the emotional places that I inhabit, and that can get tricky when life throws me a curve ball. Life isn't designed for a prolonged emotional state, there are too many things that change from moment to moment, and then here's me constantly living in the attempt to sustain one set of feelings for six to twelve weeks. It can be viewed as temperamental, but I believe it's one of the greatest reasons that artists often find themselves outside of normal life - because we have to travel to places inside ourselves that allow us to work, places normal life wouldn't necessarily require us to go.
Whenever I've worked on a long-term project or large composition, the people around me often notice that I'm off-beat, not my usual self. Often, it's because I've gone into realms inside myself that aren't necessarily easy, and it's hard work to maintain a normal life under those conditions, so the personality is subdued or pensive, because I'm busy sustaining a sense of the world that I'm working in. While the results may seem uplifting and beautiful, creating them takes more than that sensory experience. Sometimes it means a complete re-arranging of the interior mental furniture. The real beauty of it is when the audience responds exactly the way I want them to - it makes it all worth it. Which keeps me doing it all over again....