It can start with something simple. This time it was images left on the wall from years of gessoing and base coating canvases. One day I was setting up another canvas to color and it just hit me… windows and doors, that is what I saw. It was so beautiful. I imagined being able to go through them to places so far away that they looked like whispers and clouds. It was inspiring.
I love those kinds of revelations because it gives me something to grab on to; puts me on the path to creating something wonderful. Each sketch, or water color, every failed design I create from that inspiration never leads to just one place. What I mean by that is it opens a world of so many possibilities all at once that I can never just choose one. For example, those “windows” became sketches, which became pounces, which were transformed into watercolors, and then into these scarves. All of them are either a negative of positive variation on the design that I took from the wall.
Each time I re-imagine that design in a new material, or medium, it leads to learning new techniques, more ideas, more drawings, which leads to doing what I love. The journey can go from paint on canvas, to pencil on paper, to watercolor on rag, to dye on silk, and cut outs in more silk…
and finally back to gesso and canvas, in this case a 4ft. x 6ft. cradled wooden canvas.
Of course it is unfinished, but that is the point, it is never finished. It was Leonardo Da Vinci who said something along the lines of “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” And frankly it is just the tip of the iceberg.
At one point I would have said that it was a curse, or that I had ADHD, or even that I was too easily distracted. But none of that is really the truth, it is all part and parcel of the same process. I am not dillying or dallying, I am working out ideas as fast as they come to me. If I don’t then it gets all backed up in my head, I get stuck, and no other real ideas can come to the front until I clear away all the dross.
It is the process, it is the method to the madness, and I love it. Please join me next time for ‘Adventures with Scissors’.
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