Currents of Choices

Another full moon on Saturday night – it is now officially Spring.

This past week my creative river has been flowing along briskly – no ice jams here! Choices and  ideas keep growing and multiplying. Some get ruled out, others lead to new insights and options. I visualize and affirm “clarity” a lot!

In Eric Merisel's “Overcoming Creative Anxiety” course through Daily OM, he writes about creative choice-making:

Choosing provokes anxiety. Even such small matters as choosing which cereal to bring home or which television show to watch can cause a little tendril of anxiety. How much more anxiety is generated by trying to choose between spending two years on this novel or on that novel! Even more significantly, every single mark you make as a painter or word you put on the page as a writer is a choice: when you create you are constantly choosing, which means that a certain amount of anxiety is likely always to be with you as you create.

What reassuring words. We all feel tension when we create, whether we are painters, writers or wood carvers. But working through ideas and addressing the problems and surprises they bring is the heart and soul of studio work. Would you ever trade this for any other life?  I wouldn’t.

I've been making lots of painted papers for my “fluttering pages” and laying them out to see what they will look like in combination. Since the three panels will hang together as a triptych, developing quantities of papers with variety in for color, texture, pattern and values are an important first step in the design process.

 It took careful measuring, checking and rechecking every step of the way to complete this new work, but my desire was to mount and complete it for this blog post. While the idea for this started out to be rolled tubes, the substrate turned out so beautiful that I formed half cylinders from these and mounted them on the stretched canvas.

One of the original tube samples – this one has knotted strips.

  

My intention in twisting and manipulating the cut strips on the openings is to suggest lines of writing across the surface. I may paint the edges of the strips to accentuate them and make them more visible.

Here’s an informal shot of the completed work. The glare from the flash makes it difficult to see the details, but it does give you the feel of the piece. It’s Atta-Girl time; so satisfying to see a new idea launched, with new variations already standing in line waiting for their turn to be realized.