Over the last couple of years, my perspective has shifted. Like after an epiphany, I began to see differently. Expectations and assumptions either altered or vanished.
I’ve always enjoyed the process, creating, painting, etc-ing…. but inevitably it would go wrong and be set aside (that paper/fabric/material etc was expensive/so nice before I ruined it… for these reasons I can’t through it away. Haunted by a residual value… It must remain as a warning not to repeat this mistake. It must fester. It can sit there stewing in guilt, shame, regret). Weeks, months, years would pass. These ghosts of ideas would move house with me. Boxed up past failures.
Art school taught me to question these feelings, the judgemnents I made. Finally I found out why I’d kept so many of these past attempts: they weren’t wrong, they just weren’t finished!. They took a detour from the path I’d imagined for them, but that didn’t mean their journey was over.
Through these ‘new eyes’, I see possibility in so many places. This week I’ve been playing with water – as bits of dyed paper lie about my work space, often splashed and used to dry wet brushes, I came to notice how the dried watermarks disrupted the pigments of the dye/ink. This had to be investigated further…..!
The moral to this story? Keep playing! Keep on swimming! 😀
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