I'm uncomfortably excited and pleased with a piece that I recently finished. The composition, materials, and the overall tone of the finished product all converged on an unexpected sweet spot for me.
Admittedly, a lot of the work I prefer to do is hard to look at. This piece feels a bit more easy on the eyes, yet has something to say, yet also isn't heavy handed in getting that done. And, I liked doing it. Dare I say a triumph? Or at least a triumph on a smaller scale...like a 5th-graders-end-of-the-year pizza party?
Pammela Springfield, at Cannibals Gallery, had a vision for a Day of the Dead show for the month of October. I started working on
Elisha Didn't Get to Say Goodbye with that in mind. Actually, I had been wrestling with a completely different idea, of showing a Elisha in tears, staring at the empty robe laying on the road left behind by Elijah, who moments before was caught up in a fiery chariot. I couldn't really wrap my creative skull around that...seemed like it might be better expressed through cgi/special effects...but then that might have some ObiWan Kenobi connotations that I don't want. One morning, before the concerns of the day crept in, I had a eureka moment of seeing the trees expressing this event instead. For me, a tree uprooted and flying up into the air seems somehow more improbable, than your average everyday rapture. The trees can convey a human figure, and grouped together, or alone, they can provide a tone of companionship or solitude. And that literal motion of being uprooted poses some deep connotative territory for further exploration.
I find that my non-art life has been competing all the more defiantly for my attention, so it is a real gift to be excited about my creative work. This motivation and pleasure with my work is probably exactly what I need to carry me through until things calm back down in the other realms.
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