I have been struggling with this post as I did with today’s piece. It’s a muggy old day and there is still that unsettling electricity in the air that last night’s thunderstorms didn’t clear. It makes the bees irritable and over-defensive and me too really. I thought it would be a good idea to force some kind of resolution on some elements that I have been playing with for a few days or more. I thought I could use that idea up and get it out of the way, but of course things have their time and today wasn’t it! After a few other false starts it was time to take a step back and stop struggling. Now I don’t mean that in the way of giving up or giving in, rather I mean that sometimes battling with something head on does not bring results and oblique strategies and sideways thinking may prove more effective. As soon as I started to work on some other things not related to #Letter365 an elegant solution started to form and opposition crumbled away. Struggle was only interested when it thought I was up for a fight
That strategy didn’t work so well for the envelope or this writing or indeed the other work I was doing but, hey, you can’t win ’em all!
I have been forced to go into extra time today. I suppose I have got a little casual and assumed that each day my #Letter365 piece would just flow, that the picture I had in my head would get transferred into physical form and be quite wonderful. Alas today’s just turned out to be a crock of proverbial! I have to say I was quite deflated to have produced something that missed the mark quite so badly and which had no discernible redeeming feature! It really was quite depressing. Made worse by a growing headache, the fact Radio 3 keeps playing warbling women and the realisation that I had run out of envelopes and had but a little time to dash in to town and get some. So I have had to take a deep breath and relax to the fact that there was no way I would get No47 would be in the post box before collection time! That’s OK as my deadline is midnight and I have turned things round in my mind and realised that I am working in an OK way on my other stuff and this was just a hiccough that caused an overreaction and loss of confidence. We will see if all is well when I return to the studio in a few minutes to look what I have done so far!
Having said that I am now relaxed about #Letter365 I find myself, today, struggling with the first piece I created. I just couldn’t resolve it and ended up discarding it and starting afresh. There was a very small part of me that was saying “oh it will do” and “possibly no one will ever see this”, but I would not be happy in myself to have included something not up to scratch.
So I still managed to get No13 in the post before the postman came, but I ended up rushing with the photography. I probably only managed it in time because my #Collage365 piece today went like a dream.
An unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year
