on process

if you are a musician, a poet, a writer, a designer, a builder, a painter, ie: someone designated as “a creative person” you’ve been asked the question. by a supporter, a client, an observer, a buyer, a fan. (drumroll......)

“where do you get your ideas?”.... sometimes followed with....”my mind just doesn’t work that way”.....or even better: “where do you get your drugs?”

elusive. “how” to pull an idea out of the air and make it into a song, a poem, a painting is foreign to a large segment of society: to some intimidating, to others weird, and to some really cool. the “why” of it is rarely questioned. human beings can intuit why (ie: why there is music and why we resonate with it..,,) artists are humans who also intuit how . how the drums come in just so, how the rose violet is needed just there against the moss green, how the next line begs a certain delivery.

this “intuition” sits soundly on the backbone of practice, observation, focus and determination. practicing scales for years, decades; practicing line, learning to see; observing light, focusing on details. the whole process is a cycle. an artist creates, destroys, builds, knocks down, begins again. we build on the past, our predecessors then we throw it out, twist it, make it our own. some artists see the whole vision then paint it, some hear the whole symphony then write it. others begin with a feeling or just a glimpse an aching and let the piece reveal itself.

I am one of the latter. I may see a patch of a certain blue, the way it plays against a waxing translucent violet. the seeing of it catches something inside me....and then maybe a month, a day, a year later I go to it in my art: it draws me in and things connect with it on the canvas and it finds it’s own way. in many ways I find myself just an observer of what is played out before me. and when it is done and maybe way beyond the doing of it, years later, I see it and the light goes on in my head “Oh, yes.......that was what that was about....”

I guess when put like that there does seem to be much mystery in it. in the making of art. there is much mystery in all of us. how we think, make connections, feel. to me there is much mystery in the workings of a stock broker. how does that thinking, that focus come and from where? for the most part we are all the same: for the most part, two eyes, one nose, two legs. it is the bigger part, the infinite in us, the parts we can’t see that tell us uniquely where that line is going, what its width is, how it turns, how big the patch of red is and if it is bent to the blue side or the yellow. and, maybe we don’t know why, maybe we just know how. and then there are a handful, just a small handful of people on the planet who see that, see what you have done there, on that canvas and they say to themselves: “Oh yes, this is what that was about......”