Start

One of my art professors said, “When you don’t know how to move forward, remember where you’ve been.” Take a moment and examine your starting position and the choices that you made that led to this point. Are you expressing what you wanted to express? Has that intention changed or developed in the working? Do you need to modulate your approach or process in order to more clearly express yourself? Can you move forward in the same line that you are currently developing?

Each choice that we make constrains and alters our future options. Developing a work of art, each decision point represents a narrowing of the field. The work is complete when there are no choices left to make. Creation is an ongoing decision making process, refining and developing with each step forward.

Part the art making process is readjusting our ideas of control; it is important for us to embrace that ongoing procedure as we create. Allowing room for the unexpected opens us up to possibilities that we wouldn’t have seen before. It is reasonable for us to have a destination in mind, but we should resist being so fixated on the ideal that we miss other opportunities.

The unfolding of an artwork is a process of curation: pausing and considering what to retain and what to expel: what to exaggerate and what to suppress. By the time the work is finished, it should open us up to further possibilities and explorations. Art expands the both the viewer and the creator.

Returning to the beginning lets us see more clearly the path we have taken. It helps us to understand the impacts of the choices that we’ve made and the possibilities that remain open to us. Are we still moving in the direction that we struck out for? Are we still in control? Examining our creative process reveals ourselves, like seeing our reflection in a window looking out from a bright room into a dark night. We float, spectral, within our working.

Each choice expands and contracts our field of view. Our perspective shifts with each step forward. By the time we have finished an artwork, we perceive it with new insight. Feeling stuck is an invitation to reflect on ourselves and the choices we’ve made to get where we are. It gives us the opportunity to recalibrate, adjust and learn; then to move forward again with intention.