sometimes ya have to take it off...

The not-so-glamorous side of art-making. My judgment was off.  I had a certain color in mind.  I thought it would be best to blend and match the frame of the niche to the 100-year-old barbwire cage.  But after a few layers of stain followed by a rather brave dark layer it became apparent that I was wrong.  I knew the layer of stain was too dark while I was applying it Sunday afternoon but I continued because I planned more layers of lighter opaque color to mimic the patina on the old barbwire.

I was certainly sleep deprived after a long bout of insomnia.  I was also distracted.  Maybe I was just getting a little too eager to see the sculpture complete.  Regardless.  The simple fact is the “oops” factor became apparent.  The “oops” didn’t go away after I left the studio.  When I returned the following morning the mistake was even more apparent.

Here’s the deal; one has to be willing to fail in order to create.  Period.  One time while talking about being an artist with grade school children in Florida, I was asked, “What do you do when you make a mistake?”  I explained that a good deal of art making was about making mistakes – that pretty much everything I do might not be the right thing but the most important part is to simply do it.  Am I ever scared?  OFTEN.  Do I do it anyway?  Yup.

Just think of explorers.  They didn’t have a map.  Backtracking was part of moving forward in the big picture of things.  Mountaineering?  Ditto.  How about this quote which describes my life and a good deal of my process,

“Optimist: someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha.”  Robert Brault

May the cha-cha continue…