Starved Rock State Park
For as long as I can remember, I have encouraged the stream of consciousness to take me places. It has been my main mode of travel. It seemed natural, even magical at times, maybe even spiritual. All of the memorable personality traits that have been ascribed to me arise out of the stream. The waters are pretty shallow. You won't find any big boats along the way.
For a lot of reasons I have not attempted to alter the stream--at least not until I entered into a relationship with Reb. I remember my first glimpse into thinking about having an influence on the stream. The question was, would you rather paint one truly great painting or a hundred good ones. You should know I chose the one hundred path; it is where the stream would take me. Reb chose the one truly great painting. In my mind, creating one truly great painting would require a lot of work on the stream ahead of time--dredging, building dams, defining its path before ever starting the journey.
In a lot of ways the artistic work I have done is accidental. I have zero formal training in most things I do. “Left to my own devices” would be a good way to say it. I have gotten a lot of encouragement along the way.
Reb was the first one to tell me that the work I was doing was good and interesting, but with just a little more effort and consideration, it could be much better. This scared me because it felt like intuition had failed me and that was all I had.
Painting on glass, by its nature, has a “you can’t go back" feel to it. You have to paint the top layer first and work backwards. The highlights a painter might put on last as a finishing touch have to go on first. To change any of them you need to wipe or scrape all of the layers off and start again. Not the whole painting, but some areas.
I had a painting of a tree in a graveyard, a large bare tree at sunset. It was done on a window with a rounded top that Rebecca had bought for me before she moved to Rhode Island. First, I had never bought windows. I always found them in the trash when people replaced their windows and discarded the old wooden ones. Part of the stream, right?
Part of the stream is accepting where it takes you. I showed the painting to Reb and she commented that the tree and horizon were wonderful but the sky didn’t work. The sky, I thought. She was right. It could be better, but that would mean scraping around every tree branch and possibly having to recreate parts of the tree that had grown so organically with my hand and mind. It would mean altering the stream.
And so for the first time I painstakingly scraped and reworked the sky. And maybe for the first time I looked farther downstream to actually see where I was going and decide if I wanted to go there.
That was at least ten years ago. I have stepped out of the stream on many occasions since then. I still follow it but I spend more time in one area, instead of just floating along. The jury is not always in agreement but I think using the oars to steer my boat has made me a better artist. I can say with a bit more confidence that it is skill I have developed and not just luck. I've realized that changing the things I create can make them more honest, more me.
Beyond the paywall is the painting and a new song that I have spent at least a month fleshing out. It isn’t even the same song anymore. That is new to me, something I have just started doing.
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