OPTICAL ILLUSION

Artists spend all of their energy creating. There comes a moment when the vision pops into your head and it is so clear and so perfect it just has to come out. So away to the studio and up to the easel and out with the paint or pastel or clay and with pain and fear and work you wring the perfect piece out of your head and into real life. And that is where the story ends. Unless there is a buyer or a show or a charity in need of art, this perfect piece shuffles off to the closet and lives happily ever after in the dark.

Now is that any way to treat your creation?

Doesn’t something so lovingly wrought deserve a chance to become a public spectacle?

Why is it we work so hard and settle for so little, every piece we create is special? If it wasn’t we wouldn’t have forced it out through years and years of solid ivory. Why do we let it spend its best years in a closet?

It is because of an optical illusion. We pour over the latest Call To Artists, searching for the exact meaning hidden in the prospectus, because if we can just understand that we can give “the judges what they want.” And that is how you get into the winners circle isn’t it?

But what if we spent just as much time trying to expand the definition of the Call by allowing our creativity to see every work as a perfect match, “Birds”, you say, “I have the perfect thing, just let me tilt it the right way” or, “fish, I have one right here, it looks sort of like a bird, but then that’s art.”

Flowers, pots, cats, rats and puppy dog tails all fit if you view the prospectus the right way. No, I wouldn’t go so far as to enter a steam locomotive in a maritime show, but I would look at it again. That’s the trick, look at all of your work, again and again. One of these times you’ll see something that wasn’t there before and maybe it’s a perfect fit for the show, the Rat’s Nest gallery is holding, maybe not. But if it is still in the closet it will never get a second look. (Gee, maybe that’s when a portfolio disc would be real handy? But I shouldn’t harp on past articles.)

So before you tuck the latest canvas into the back of the closet or the bottom of the cellar take another look. Does it look just like the iris you painted last March or can you see something else in the leaves? If you see a likeness of a saint then you can open a shrine and if it’s just an iris which looks a lot like a diving cormorant, might just be that bird you were looking for.