Ynotartblog's Blog

Coloring, cutting, and pasting paper seem like simple actions until you go a step further and want the color, the cut, and the pasting to be something else. That something else may be the merest sparkle of an undefined vision. All that coloring, cutting, and pasting to capture a sparkle involves more actions leading to other actions until the vision appears, almost appears, or doesn’t appear. (There is the “abandon ship” ending, which I have done but find totally impossible to do completely. In other words, those works abandoned midway are still hanging around.) Regardless of the outcome…other interesting visuals/ideas hopefully have appeared during the journey leading back to a beginning.

Those three simple actions are accompanied by a stack full of questions: What color? Where? How large? How wide? Where? What about over there? What about this color there?, Is it making a statement? Is it balanced? Is there tension? Over and over again the same questions as things get changed and more complex. To that mix is added the effects of reactions, hard-core resolutions, time, habits, detours, criticisms, loves, and thoughts of all sorts. And so on. It’s life. Therein lies the play, the dance, the discovery. The pleasure.

Answering those questions, which form the chain of creative decisions, is further challenged by the activity of looking. The going can get bumpy when you look but don’t feel you are seeing clearly. Squinting, lighting changes, blinking rapidly, varying perspective, putting the work aside for a while, and sudden, darting glances might help, but they also might not provide a fully confident look at what is “really” before you. Not to worry too much. Before the frustration level gets too intense and the joy of solving creative challenges begins to fade, ta da…digital camera snapshots can be the eyes best friend! (See previous post, Snapshots Along the Way.)

All these thoughts to simply say…

I am so very grateful for my digital camera. Triteness be damned, I don’t know what I would do without it. It helps me see my work in progress, see the history of the progress, see what is working and what isn’t. It helps me see the placement of the color pieces after the wind has blown them off the board or after I accidentally brushed them out-of-place. It records work I laid out but never pasted. It is my diary. It’s a friend who tells me like it is, and I have the responsibility to take advantage of its help. How do I give thanks? Let me count the ways… Please excuse my emotional digression at the expense of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fine poem. But, I do like my handy, smart, straightforward, flexible, easy to use, silver, travels-well digital camera. My Seeing Eye friend of the arts.

In thinking about just how simple, or not, my creative process is, I thought I might want to research the tools I use to color, cut, and paste. Using Wikipedia and a web site called whoinventedit.com, I found that the invention/development of the tools I use goes back to 200,000 BC for glue, c 1500 BC in Egypt for scissors, early 2nd century China for paper, mid-20th century for computers, the 1950s for acrylic paint, and 1975 for the digital camera–thanks to Steven Sasson. That’s a long time to make it possible for a person to simply color paper, cut it, paste it, capture the image immediately on a digital camera, transfer it to a computer, and blog about it. And for the whole world to see!