After two months or so, I am finally back to creating. It feels good. The pace is a bit manic as if I need to catch up with the time lost. There isn’t any “metric” I have to hit so maybe it’s just all of this bent up creativity. There really aren’t any guidelines on producing, after all, how many pieces do I need to create in a month? Or a year?
The pieces I create only have to meet a certain criteria. These works have to have a kind of “rightness” to my eye. What this quality is, and this is incredibly difficult to put into words, is that it meets a goal of not mere “beauty” or of merely being something “new”. I’m just trying to produce a “rightness”.
Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, once said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. I think the same can be said of art. Creating art or viewing art is really an experience. The experience I seek is to be pleased not only with the beauty I create but to seeing the contrasts in my work. Seeing a new work with old parts; seeing an abstract work with representational pieces; and seeing the familiar in new ways.
This piece, with some parts stained and others not, still needs to be “figured out”. It is a familiar process and yet there is much mystery in the process. But the joy of creating has returned.