I was wondering about what to say today and then I recalled something which happened three decades ago. I made two art works which were inspired by a postcard I bought somewhere. Three decades ago, postcards were treasures we collected when we travelled and we occasionally sent one of those to someone somewhere to tell them of what we had witnessed. Anyway, let me fill in my “postcard” for the day.
I will divulge a little of how I normally “think” or what my mental state looks like when I have decided it is time to let something emerge from the whiteness of the nothingness I see on the sheet of paper or the canvas. I am not the most relaxed person around and when I know it is time to become creative, I feel a little more driven and apprehensive, because the way I “operate” can be likened to a “self-induced private colourful little storm”. I really admire other artists who tell me they disappear into another world and they are calm and everything just works like a charm. When one is working with oil paint and turpentine then the storm is magnified as far as I am concerned; the cleaning up is another battle that awaits one.
Just a final note about my modus operandi: I think I am a more spontaneous “do-it-all-in-one-go”-artist. However, I do have the tenacity (like other artists) to see a very tedious process through too, but at heart I am an “impressionist-expressionist”, if I there is such a label available. My art teacher at school told me that being able to construct something “speedily” was part of my gifting, and to this day I treasure her affirmation. (It helped me to make peace with my in-born arty ways.)
Let me get this “unfair” story off my chest. You will see I included two art works here and these are the ones I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this blog. As you can see the one is cubistic and calculated; the other is very spontaneous. The structured one took about 20 hours to complete and that happened over a period of days when I was still in the army. (A friend who visited me when I was working on the cubistic one told me that he thought a person creating art would be in a more relaxed state of mind, but in my case it was not true, unfortunately I shattered his ideal picture of how the artist should behave.) The other one took me no more than 10 minutes. As the creator of these works, I should like them both, and I do, but somehow, I seem to lean more towards the 10-minute one, for some strange unknown reason. Perhaps my mind is telling me: You don’t need to spend 20 hours; you can take a short cut!” This is the “unfair” truth about art (according to me) which I drew attention to in the heading: The work that took 20 hours and the work that took 10 minutes can be rivals for the same prize. (Which one do you think, deserves the prize?)
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