I always feel most creative and inspired after I clean. For this reason, we are both anxious for our upcoming show to come and go. There's a cleansing effect to this and its time to get back to work. Right now, our studio is filled with pseudo stopped clocks, lives that been put on pause it seems, our art, and potential parts of work are just waiting, literally collecting dust. The art itself is starving.
I can recall a time I made 2 moves on a new canvas and I was amazed at the beauty and simplicity, the innocence of the piece. I felt so elated by the purity. I admired and was in awe of what was in front of me. But then enters the cloud of quickly forming doom and my brain whispering "Nope, its not enough". Our minds sometimes can't allow for such ease, there must be more to this relationship, right? Why can't it be that simple? Why can't 2 beautiful marks or splotches be enough? They felt like enough at the time. Why do we keep meddling?
Will I start fresh, or add to something existing?
Will I under or over work the next piece?
Maybe it's selfishness. I got to experience that beauty that happened from MY connectivity after all. Was that just for me? Or do I just not like sharing? Or maybe it's the guy who came up with the term "struggling artist". Why do we have to struggle?!
Raymond and I were talking this morning about the act of waiting for the right mindset in which to enter the studio. It's like flying a plane above a storm, waiting for the exact moment to dive through a break through the clouds. It is a very fragile and delicate thing. It is life or death for the piece. And that is it, we are slaves to the finished work. We have to honor and obey, listen and react. For this work just showing up and applying skill isn't enough. It is the obedience to clarity, vision, feeling, passion.
It is the conjuring up of a physical form that exists in the future.
And it can be painful to get it there.
That's the other side of it. Sometimes we don't know when to stop, to walk away, to leave it be. And that often results in the common death of what may have someday landed on your wall. Whether it is overworked or suffocating, there's a lot that has been created and never shared. Seen but not shared. Some things just aren't meant to to passed on.
“Your gift to create is equaled by your ability to destroy.”
