Ingrid Murray, Author at Ingrid Murray

Messy May 2023

An open mixed media art journal. A layer of mostly neutral collage (and one large teal painted paper) is topped with energetic marks and drips in black, neon pink, white, orange, and blue. Most of the background shows through.

Over the weekend I took part in a Creative Hour conversation with Caylee Grey, Meg of Meg Journals, Claudette Hasenjager and more than 100 other art journalers. Caylee is the founder of Get Messy, and Claudette, Meg, and I are three of thirty artists leading this year’s Messy May, a free daily art journaling project.

Connecting with other creatives is something I treasure. Sharing processes, challenges, inspiration, and habits reminds me both of how deeply personal creating necessarily is, and also how universal and innately human creativity is. I am always humbled and inspired, and leave more curious about and committed to my creative practice.

Thank you to all the participants for joining, and to Claudette, Meg, and Caylee for a fantastic conversation.

PLAY in Messy May

For me, creating is a practice of tapping into childlike wonder and intuition. There is no room in my art journal for criticism or perfectionism — only curiosity, joyful exploration, and reflection. As a Messy May featured artist, I encouraged participants to let go of expectations and tap into playfulness and possibility.

Check out the video above for a time lapse of my process, and some additional creative prompts to encourage playfulness.

And below, just a few of the many, many responses to the PLAY prompt. Click on any image to be taken to the artist’s feed. (If you decide to give it a go, please tag me on Instagram! I’d love to see what you make.)

Pinch Me

A fluffy gray and white cat sleeps upside down in a sunny windowsill.

A view looking up into just-leafing trees in early spring.

This morning, six weeks after moving to Germany — and after years of wanting this to be my reality — I marveled that I’m here. This happened.

My husband and I came back a few days ago from a trip to see his family in Tunisia; though we saw ancient ruins and the ocean and had a wonderful visit, the most magical part was coming home. We live together. This is our everyday life.

It still feels like vacation.

Why abstract art?

Open mixed media art journal. A layer of collage (graph paper, security envelope) is topped with energetic abstract marks in teal and turquoise, green, neon pink, and dark blue. Much of the background shows through.

I admire photorealism: it takes a huge amount of patience and technical skill to represents external reality well.

What I love about abstract art, though, is the conveying of emotion, experience, thought, and existence through form, color, movement, texture, and composition. It represents internal reality.

When I create my work, I tap into a sense of childlike wonder, letting intuition and joy lead the creative process. I choose colors that feel right in that moment. I scribble and splatter. I react to what’s on the page; nothing is preplanned.

Last year, I went to see a Joan Mitchell exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Joan’s paintings are huge and inspired by “remembered landscapes that I carry with me — and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. … I could certainly never mirror nature. I … like more to paint what it leaves me with.”

The point of abstract art is expression and curiosity, not perfection.

(Un)Making a Home

A view of a living room that is well lit, cheerful, and artistically maximalistic.

A completely empty room with sunlight shining through the windows.

Familiarity is comfortable and change, no matter what it looks like, is unbearably hard.

Earlier this month, I said goodbye to an apartment I loved deeply, a safe space that was home to me for longer than any other place before it. (And look at that light!) This is the first place that I settled into and made my own. I celebrated my 30th birthday here. It was my cats’ first home, and where I honed my artistic style. While living in this apartment, I made friendships that will last a lifetime; I found my center and my self worth. This space saw me through the pandemic, through anguish and big joys, and I grew more here in the past five years than in all the years prior.

Before leaving, I worked for days alongside my mom and best friend, running on adrenaline, sorting through and clearing out a literal decades’ worth of things. We scrubbed and painted. We sold my car.

I kept little, but I’m grateful that so many of my things, curated with love, now live in my friends’ and family’s homes.

When the space was empty, we drove to the airport with my two cats. And after 14+ hours of travel, my mom and I arrived at in Cologne, Germany, and I was reunited with my husband.

My mom went home yesterday. It’s been a little over a week since we left Baltimore, and I am still acclimating to the time difference and processing all the change that’s happened and all the change to come.

And yes, while I’m thrilled to finally be here, it has also been immeasurably hard. But we are resilient, even when things are uncertain, even when we take a big leap outside of what is familiar. And through all this change, I’ll learn that home is anywhere there’s a sense of belonging — and vice versa.

Doorways

Close up of a trash bag containing various art supplies, including crayons, painted papers, charcoal, etc.

A hand holds a greyscale, loosely painted 3/4 portrait of a woman looking to the left, with minimal highlights in pink and green.

Time flies. Very soon, I’ll be living in Germany.

I’ve spent the last several months purging, going through a lifetime of papers, art supplies, trinkets, and things put in closets years ago and long forgotten about. Taking multiple trips to the donation center. Giving away beloved items, thrilled that many of them will have a new home with family and friends. Shedding so many old things, and making room for the new.

I got my first tattoos with two humans I love dearly, mementos to remind me of the community that is here for me, forever.

I can’t help but think, often, of Jonny Sun‘s book Goodbye, Again, where he writes so beautifully about life and transitions and joy and heartbreak. One quote, about how many final goodbyes we have already said, sticks with me — though my copy is currently already at my new home and I can’t find the exact words. But he’s also written that “goodbyes are doorways, never doors,” and I’m holding on to that, too.

It’s been incredibly bittersweet.