You are tired. You need a cry. You need someone to tell it all too. You need to get unstuck. You are paralyzed with the mess of it all. Sometimes days are like this. Things can feel out of control but you are acutely aware something, someone, needs to do something. That someone is you.
I watch my progress in art making and realize that in all things that there is a time when a piece is a mess and may even seem unable to be fixed. I rarely ditch my messes. I tend to work and work at it and, if needs be, erase the whole thing. Gesso over it, over collage over it and begin a new way of solving a particular art piece that is in my head and wants down on substrate.
I may have many things on the go at once. I may be making jewelry out of my tumbled stones. I may be doing a diamond paint… yes, at the same time. I may be doing a canvas piece. I may be doing an art journal page. I may be doing an example for my private art students’ class for the week. And, yes, again… All at the same time. It means I have paper and tools and every space on my dining room table, over, beside, beneath, and on my desk and I no longer apologize for the mess. I keep it as organized as I can but still… it would overwhelm many. To me, it is like saying I have spent a day well worth being spent. It is like having control when there could look like there is little. There is no quick solution to it. I deal with it because it is, to me, part of my process of living a life worth living.
I think any mess in life can be handled in such a way. We are all works in progress. Our lives are works in progress. We can see any mess in life as a problem or we can acknowledge that this is what it is for the time being and we simply let go of the guilt and the shame of having a messy life and become paralyzed. Or we can make the best use of the mess that we can. Lots of things in life do not go the way other people might have it go. We might not deal with our messes in the same ways. We are not ignoring the mess. We are allowing ourselves to have a mess now and again and not have it make us feel “less then”, “not enough”, and make the most of it.
I can clean up and organize this mess in an hour. I may have to hide some of it, but I can make it look like a “less mess” by setting things in order…my sense of “order”. Knowing that I could deal with this organized mess takes the pressure off. I know that the reward of being creative, of working through a specific art problem, being able to have everything at my fingertips, is worth it with what comes of the problem once I am finished a process. Yes, it is what I do with this mess, in the end, that makes getting through to that finished project, that counts. I can them, put the “mess” away and go on to make a mess while doing something else.
As a cook, I can end up with flour all over my counters, pans stacked in the sink, my mixmaster spun spots all over me and the place, my grease spit all over the stove top, the pie dripped over in the oven, but, oh, the joy of having a challenging product smell divine and the finished product being edible is payment enough. My payment is tidying up the kitchen that got “messy” while I was in the act of creating a finished product. Life is like that.
There is never a mess you cannot deal with. Problems are part of life. It is okay to have amess. It is okay to acknowledge that it IS a mess but it is “something in the process” of being completed. We complete the problem when we are done dealing with the things inside that problem, little by little, brush stroke by brushstroke, and suddenly, we can get control of what may look like a mess to others. Really, we were in control all the while.
We are all in the cocoon of problems all the time. What is not seen is the work happening where it can not be seen. Inside that cocoon is a butterfly in the making. And underneath a duck floating gracefully, effortlessly, on a pond has little legs and feet paddling like hell underneath the surface. That’s life. When we have a “mess” do not despair. You are still in control of you inside that mess. You do not have to be an artist to figure this out. There is a wonderful quote out there that says: “God is not finished with me yet!” That’s life. That’s us!
Mess on sisters! Mess on!
©Carol Desjarlais 5.14.23
**to see what a mess happened when I did this painting in fluid acrylics, go to the Facebook grouphttps://www.facebook.com/groups/1841395556197634
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