I am newly aware, that I like things that break. Both my current main mediums, gourds and glass, break. Sometimes, this does break my heart, but if I step back a bit, and allow the break to show me something new. Something I hadn’t seen: a new shape? a new edge? a new texture? Maybe there is a shift in color, or size, or how the light hits it.
Sometimes I am trying to be, just - oh so careful.
I am bent down low, squinting my eyes and pressing just enough to slip a tiny piece of glass into a uniquely odd little slot between two edges or colors or textures. All of my work is bit by bit. I may begin with a larger complex image in mind, or not. Sometimes the little bits swirl in my fingers until they land into the art piece making definitions of their own.
Sometimes I have begun to pursue a specific pattern or pallet and must find or break bits to create the perfect piece to fit.
Jigsaw puzzles force us to see how each piece must be turned and viewed differently to find the fit, but here I am making each piece. Eventually I am always left to finish intricately and intimately with small delicate pieces straddling a moment of tension, attempting perfection, and then – crack.
I pick the pieces of my heart and the little bits off the floor.
Sometimes I need to go take a walk. Always there is a need to swallow first the lump in my throat, and then my pride. Occasionally I see something I hadn’t seen, a new bit, far from the perfect shape and color I thought I had. And then, maybe, it shifts in my hand, or in my mind’s eye. One imperfect piece has become two. And just maybe I see the slot it was supposed to go into differently. Perspective changes and the problem becomes the inspiration.
Most mistakes take time to meld into new solutions.
My art teaches me techniques. My mistakes might become my most inspired accents, or my newest directions for the next thing to draw my creative soul back to the work-table. Things that break drive us forward in art, and in life. The key I guess, is to recognize that failure is only the result of a mistake,
if we fail to see new possibilities before we wallow in the despair of not getting what we thought we want.
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