Ugly Ducklings and Swans
Two experimental collaged cards which led me into my Stitch in Time daily collages in 2010. I still like the red & black limited palette.
Do you get slightly embarrassed at your art efforts from years ago? I look at some of the works I made in the past and I think them to be simplistic, experimental and mostly unresolved. However when viewed on mass, I can also see they were building my skills as I attempted to learn something about the quality, capability and possibilities of my materials.
It can take years of producing these ‘ugly ducklings’ before a swan emerges to take flight. Through it all the thing I have learned is to keep going. When something doesn’t work or isn’t accepted into an exhibition or gets overlooked when exhibited, the trick is not to take it personally.
Creating art, like creating a business, takes time and patience and a willingness to ‘fail’. Then it’s all about tenacity, determination and the drive to overcome and be resilient in the face of seemingly unsurmountable odds.
As Henri Matisse once said, “Creativity takes Courage.”
It’s that courage you need to draw on when you have to back yourself and go out on a limb. A kind of crazy restlessness that draws you to take leaps of faith. When viewed by someone from the outside, it can look foolhardy or risky or a little bit ’mad’. But by the artist, it’s an inner drive, a calling that must be heeded or feel forever stifled.
There are certain books that resonate with me because they explore that same “crazy restlessness”. John Steinbeck wrote about the “urge to be some place else” in the opening lines to his book Travels with Charlie. And Charlotte McConaghy writes about the main protagonist Franny always ‘leaving’ in her book Migrations.
This “virus of restlessness” that plagues writers and artists alike, can strike you at any time. The memoir The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, describes how the author and her husband lost everything and so they took off and began walking. This journey became a lifeline which moved them homelessness to hope and healing.
I can see why books such as I’ve mentioned, jump out at me from the library shelves. READ ME they call out. I take comfort and inspiration from identifying with the characters, who are always processing their inner thoughts through the act of travelling.
Spiritual pilgrimages are made from the same stuff. Walking, travelling, movement of one kind or another are the way we transition from one state of thinking and being to the next. All is a journey, a process of becoming, a spiral of learning which leads us deeper into our own essence.
I bless those early artistic ‘ugly ducklings’ as the markers along my path of discovery. I can look at them and say “Oh, I lost my way here” or “look at what I discovered here that I can focus on next”. Art and life - both are journeys of discovery and wonder.
Blue Window Woman (detail) 2011. Another early multilayered collage of woodblock & lino prints. It’s much better cropped!
