Moments

I had a conversation with an old friend today about an art class she is about to take, and one of the things we talked about was how for me it is impossible to say that every day at a specific time I am going to write, or I am going to paint. Those moments can’t be forced, they just happen.

Sort of like this post. One of my goals with this is to post every day, partly because I am a goal oriented person by nature, and partly because I want to be able to put my thoughts down on a daily basis and share them.

When I sat down just now I turned the computer on to check e-mail and the hockey score and then realized, “hey I haven’t posted today.” That was not a good feeling, nor was the feeling of having absolutely nothing come to me. I was sitting here looking at the blog, staring at it really, thinking that I was tired, and a bit used up by the day and the week and really did not want to post tonight. Not posting did not feel good, and so I started to go through in my head the possibilities, not post and miss a day already, in week one, post something lame just to post, post something just to create the heading and then edit it in the morning when I am fresh - can you tell I was panicking - going through all of these things in my head, which took a lot less time to think than they did just now to write.

At the end of that panicked, circuitous train of thought, more like a toy electric train, I remember the conversation from earlier today and realized that this is something I wanted to write about and I suddenly felt like writing. I know, the longest intro ever.

When I paint it is because I have to, or at least I have something in my head that needs to be on canvas and thus I want to. When I write it is exactly the same, and sometimes when I am done, maybe most of the or all of the time, when I am done it makes no sense, but that is because I write non-stop until the thought is completely out of me, or until I run out of gas, whichever comes first. I have hundreds of files that contain pieces of a thought, sometimes a couple of sentences or paragraphs, sometimes a few pages, but when I no longer feel it I stop and I never go back to that thought and finish.

With painting it is a bit different, only a couple of times have I just stopped and realized I did not feel like painting. Most of the time when I paint I will finish a painting, or the portion I am working on, in just a few hours, look at it and be done. Occasionally when I paint I will get to a point where I realize it is not going where I had envisioned and I will wither leave it, or more likely finish it with far less fervor.

The other thing for me about writing versus painting is that painting is always very calm and quiet and peaceful and probably the only time in my life when I am not stressed, not thinking about much, if anything, and just completely in that particular moment, that particular brush stroke or pull of the pallet knife. When I write there is obviously a great deal on my mind, going through my mind and the challenge becomes to get as much of it down on “paper” as possible, as quickly as possible and as close to the form it was in my head when I began. I am hopeful that as the process matures for me I will be able to go back to a piece that I have written and get more of the entirety of the original thought capture than I tend to now. Only time will tell.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.