driftwood

Much of what I do as an artist is serendipitous.  Meaning that not every piece is a masterpiece.  Much like life, I just keep making the best decisions I can and I hope will turn out well.  The more I know and the more experience I have as I move forward in life, the better my decisions and the more often I have a successful outcome.  But in my art the really good pieces almost seem to paint themselves.  I often feel it is a spiritual experience.  I cannot make a mistake and it is a thing to experience. Yet I cannot, for love, money or blood, recreate them...The other stuff I can...

This is the experience my fellow artist all have.  In fact, I have not met one that does not share this experience.  I had one say they enjoy a 2/3 success rate, two out of every three.  Mine is a bit lower.  Quite a bit.  Which leads to the discussion about what success is, really.  But that's a whole other blog...

Last weekend we took the dogs to the river.  Max, my retriever loves to swim for sticks.  Cloe, my schnoodle loves to roll in smelly stuff!  Anyway, my husband handed me a piece of driftwood to look at.  It was beautiful.  Gnarled and warn down by the water. Who knows how long it floated, what kind of wood it was, how far it traveled, what had shaped it.  But it was a work of art. 

I remember thinking I could never create something so beautiful in all its raw simplicity.  (and you know nature moves me!)  That God himself had a hand in the design of this piece.  There was lots of other driftwood to be found on that riverbank, but none that was so beautiful to me.  And I wondered about the process I personally go through to create.  Each piece having a different journey along the currents and meeting unique forces that shape them, but still flowing in the same river of my personal creative experience.  Some of those results are good.  Some of it is awful!  And every so often, I get some fine "driftwood".  And it gives me a lot of joy!  My happy thought is that when we create and that happens, we share something with a much larger creative force.  Serendipity?  Call it what you will.  The driftwood is on my coffee table...