Where has my Muse gone?

It happens all too often. I finish a painting that I really love but then I find myself stalled. I look at the bed where I spread my "in progress" paintings and find myself uninspired. Still, I call myself an artist so I trudge forward after a few (or several) days in hiding. I go in there every day and look for something to inspire me to work on. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

So I eventually lay out a few paints and begin to poke away at each of my potential failures spread before me. Now, I am talking maybe an hour of work on 15 pieces of Yupo paper. They all begin to have the same colors as their basis. Still I see only failure. Sure I am painting a few images but they are not pleasing to me. They will not "settle" into a complete and unified image. Yuck! Now what? Where has my muse gone?

Next step to avert total failure as an artist is to paint over large sections of them with white paint. These are bold strokes meant to either obliterate all that has gone before or head me off in another better direction. I was reading a blog the other day that posed a question, "Is painting more work or more fun?" Well I guess that depends when you ask me. Right now, it is painful work.