wookie just did me a solid and gave my slightly-sagging spirits a boost. i’ve got this piece i’m working on and it’s a large one and therefore needs a lot of different images and although i’ve had the basic layout done for several days i could not figure out what to do in the middle and an interesting middle is crucial for the overall effectiveness of the piece, at least most of the time(and this is one of them). anyways i’ve been hemming and hawing and the thing about collage is that you’re limited to the images that you can find, you can’t just conjure them up out of the mind like you can with pretty much all other types of art. so i’ve been thumbing through cut-outs and trying different combinations and this morning i thought i had it when i came across an ad that had an amorphous group of people dashing toward another amorphous person who was standing in the center of the crowd holding an orange something-or-other, i thought that image was going to do it but after doing a lot of intricate cutting(each little amorphous person with their hands and feet and heads and arms) i discovered that the scene just didn’t look right inside the larger picture, it looked somehow EXTRANEOUS or something and over the years i’ve tried to pare the collages down to their necessary constituent parts and have started to drift away from flourishes and filler. so that was out. instead i arranged some neat looking sea urchin-type things in a row sort of diminishing into a sun which is actually an eye. when it was layed out i was still as unsure as i was when i started and also frazzled and a little dejected, i got up before 5 this morning and this was many hours later and my progress felt stymied and my attempts futile.
which is when wookie wandered into the picture and looked at the piece and said “guess which 2 parts i’m not completely sold on?” and i said “the horse that looks like he’s popping out of a window and the dragster in the top left corner” and she said “how did you know that?” and i wasn’t exactly sure but maybe i’m just starting to be onto her or something. anyways that wasn’t the good part, the good part was when she looked at it some more and said “i really like the middle part”. and this is what she was looking at:
i know the photo is no great shakes but you get the idea.
now i’m not strictly a confident person in most areas but generally i do have faith in my capacities in the arenas of art and music, the 2 things i’ve invested the most time and energy in during my 45 years hanging around on the corners of this world. i think i’m confident in these pursuits because i’ve done them often enough and long enough to develop my own approach to both of these things and once you’ve staked out your own little piece of real estate in any certain endeavor you’re in like flynn, i mean that’s kind of the whole point. i heard it said once about public opinion that “some people are going to like it, some people are going to hate it, but most people won’t give a fuck one way or the other” and i think that’s true. but back to the gift wookie gave me this morning.
the thing is that since moving into this apartment i haven’t FINISHED a single piece of art and while the 4 i have going might be considered far enough along, until they’re finished they’re not DONE. which means that all the self-doubt that is kept at bay when you’re producing stuff begins to creep back into the picture little by little and the longer it takes the more doubt you’re gonna have to deal with. being stuck on the above collage was allowing that self-doubt to hang around and grow and do all that other negative shit that feelings and thoughts of this nature thrive on. until wookie’s little basket of kind words was put before me and blew those fucking things right out of the water. that’s all it took, words are funny things in that way. so use them carefully and use them wisely and for god’s sake try to use them in constructive ways, the world needs more good words.
infinity trigger art 