Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true” while Yoda offered, “Do or do not, there is no try.”
For Linzy Arnott, an artist from Pitt Meadows, B.C. whose exhibition When the Muse Calls opens at Elevation Gallery in Canmore Saturday (July 19), Shakespeare’s line from Hamlet and Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker couldn’t describe her career better.
Once labelled as an abstract artist and then as a landscape artist, Arnott let the labels dictate what she painted.
“I allowed these labels to over-ride the direction the muse called me in and that started an internal war between my creative freedom and what I thought I should be painting in order to be taken seriously in the art community,” she wrote in her artist statement for her upcoming show When the Muse Calls, which opens at Elevation Gallery in Canmore Saturday (July 19) from 2-7 p.m.
It wasn’t until a few months ago that she broke free from that war of trying to paint what was expected of her and in a flash of inspiration realized that she is not a landscape artist and she is not an abstract artist. Instead, she is an artist.
And with that realization came the freedom to pursue what inspires her, or as the show suggests, when the muse calls.
On any given day, the muse takes her from ethereal seascapes to glowing waterfalls to decaying structures. Arnott is inspired by whatever it may be that catches her attention on any given day.
But it took her a while to get there; she had to first trust herself and her work and follow her heart, instead of what others said, thought or expected.
“I think I have figured it. I just have to follow my inspiration. If it works, great and if not, I just have to be true to myself.”
And part of that is not thinking but doing – something Yoda himself would certainly approve of.
“My motto now is don’t think just do. As soon as I start getting too involved in a painting it just goes out the window. I just have to do what feels right. I can’t overthink it,” she said.
And if she does, Arnott won’t hesitate to paint over what she was working on and simply start over.
When she instead goes with her gut and her heart, it all comes together.
“I paint the places I want to be in my heart,” she said. “I absolutely love water. When I was a kid I’d sit on the beach and study the different qualities in the water and depending on the type of day and the wind, the colours in the water were just breathtaking. I’d just watch the colours change and the colours of distant islands, but a lot of my work is of the West Coast, sunsets and seascapes even the waterfall pieces, those are mostly from my imagination but are inspired by (reality).”
Arnott works with acrylic paints, mixing each colour with white to make them more opaque and with a gel medium that allows her to build texture into her paintings through the many layers in each painting, sometimes up to 40.
When the Muse Calls is Arnott’s first solo show at Elevation Gallery and it is also the first time she has had the freedom to share all of the different styles that all come together to define her.
“As I grew up I realized that freedom I feel best living from, freedom to think and freedom to feel. It’s this constant road of finding my own personal freedom in life,” she said.
Yoda and Shakespeare would be pleased.
