In creating art you aim for a vision and you never get there but sometimes you get close. Sometimes, very close. There are other times where you miss completely your vision but in the process you find a completely different approach. Surprisingly this can be better then what you were originally aiming for.
When you miss entirely what you were trying to do, then what? Keep the piece as a record of what you tried to do? Decommission it (a nice way to describe destroying the work)? Throughout history artists have destroyed their works, painting over their canvases or smashing sculptures. Sometimes in anger, sometimes in despair and sometimes in frustration. No one ever suggested that creating was easy… or straight forward but this still doesn’t answer what to do with works that don’t live up to your vision.
This Foundling is called Pan and was one of my first ventures into using silver tones. I have had some real successes using silver and it has been surprising. I had thought that only gold, with its warm color, would work with my Foundlings. This work, on the other hand, seems not to have achieve what I was working towards—but I liked the silver.
Do I keep this or do I take it apart? There is real beauty in creating another piece from a “less then successful” work, not unlike creating a Foundling from material thought worthless. There is always a fear that in the future I might regret my decision to take a work apart but in the past I have actually returned to works, long finished, and continued to work on them, integrating them into larger other pieces. This has frequently been successful and a very gratifying approach. So what to do?
I guess I will wait.