Ynotartblog's Blog

Moments of assessment are the guardians of my creative process. I enjoy taking a step back, looking at the whole piece, and asking some direct questions. How can I make this better? How are the color interactions? What does it need? What do I need to subtract? or rearrange? Attentive looking. I’m connected to the piece at this point, and I’m concerned. I make or don’t make a change(s) and move on…until the moment comes again to take a good look.

And then, every now and then, not too often, but often enough, comes the dreaded moment when I want to take that good look at how a piece is progressing, and, well, I am looking at it, but I can’t see it. No matter how close I bring my eyeballs to the work, no matter how many different points of view I take, I just can’t see a darn thing. My sense of processing what I am looking at has been disconnected, deactivated, arrested, struck dumb. I have been rendered sightless. For my own best interest, I then need to take a deep breath and calmly redirect my attention.

Focused moments of checking and balancing happen throughout the various stages of each work. The time involved can be rapid or extended. Even with the constant check-ups, a piece can venture pretty far before a moment of clarity declares a brutal, but satisfying, action: abort. I did all I can. This piece is not working for me.

In this case, the looking involved too much wishful thinking. What started off with a rush of excitement, with much effort to make it work, eventually petered out. Something felt flat. I decided to stop and brushed the cutouts back into a box. ( A resurrection of this idea is possible. There is still something about this piece that piques my interest.)