| I feel like an artist this morning because last night I worked on a collage piece which I had in my head, but didn’t turn out the way I liked. So I started doing some doodles on it with gel pens and it made it worse. I slept on it and, guess what, I still hated it. So, I started over. Went right over the top of the old piece and started from the beginning.
This makes me feel like an artist for several reasons: I didn’t give up art altogether just because something turned out bad. Laugh it up, monkey boys, but there was a time where I would have retreated from art altogether. I also didn’t get mad at myself for not making something perfect or for screwing up even more something which might have been salvaged. Finally, I shrugged and just used the old mess as a base for the new work. Now how is that for a life lesson?
I’ve been subscribing to Julia Cameron’s philosophy of taking care of the quantity and letting the gods take care of the quality. This means lots of poems, art pieces, doodling, sketches and you know what? I’m noticing an improvement in both how I view things and in my work. I see detail more, but at the same time see how the detail is just made up of patterns, like doodling. I see color. Actually seeing colors always reminds me of the part of the Girl with a Pearl Earring where she looks at the clouds and finally sees how they are made up of all colors – they aren’t just grey and white – and realizes why Vermeer can’t paint a blue gown with blue paint.
And a cool thing happened this week that made me very happy. I told my husband that I was starting a list of stuff I want for Christmas – all of which are art-related. We always give our parents a list to choose from. Anyway, I was saying how I wanted to try working on canvas and he said “I’ll buy you canvases. I want to see your list, I can get you what you want.” This is huge because I always feel like he sneers at my “crafts”.