Wall Art

Why is it that art takes you? It's like a lover sometimes who, with a gentle stroke along an innocuous body part, sends tingles through you and totally changes everything you thought you were doing into something else, or something more. Everyday I go to work. The studio is littered with yesterday's debris, metal cutouts and grinder dust, empty water bottles and sanding discs. I never have enough strength at the end of the day to clean it up and I never, at the beginnning of the day, feel I have the time. There is an ache in my bones, the inevitable metal sliver lodged between a callous and the tender skin on the tip of my finger that nags at me but is too deep to remove with the heavy tools in my studio. I feel the weeks of build and grind in my back, my shoulders, behind my eyes and deep into my sinues. Still, I begin. And I think I am going to do something, turn out a small standing piece because that is what is lacking at the moment and there is little time to fill the demands. I start to move toward the metal, the long strips of four inch that look like tounges sticking out of the mouth of the garage door, licking the stones of the gravel driveway. But I am distracted. There is gentle touch, a tremor, and suddenly I am digging though my scrap pile, shoving plastic bottles and discarded discs out of my way, clearing the rubble to find my tape measure, soap stone, eye protection. Because somehow, I am somewhere else, deep into a new piece of metal wall art, moving round and round, cutting bits here, adding bits there, kicking myself. Now I am another day off my build schedule and one short of the number of small pieces I need to meet the next deadline. There is no order to it, no reason. Still there is the tremor, the beginnings of something new, the sharp points of the form careening like daggers into space and across time. Today, yesterday, there appeared the abstraction of morning, the collison of dream and reality, the sleepy, one-eye-open taking in of the world that was finished this afternoon in red and black and silver. Hardly morning colors, or exactly morning colors. Dawn, promise, harsh reality and caress of sleep, the body stretching before it remembers the aching muscles. I don't know how creativity happens. Its as improbable as a kiss while you are doing the dishes and just as dangerous. Because if the kiss is good enough, the dishes don't get done. And my standing pieces aren't getting done. Its funny how it shifts. The standing pieces are so intuitive, emotional. The wall art is different. First, like the metal sculpture, they are a mood, a feeling, the hint of a memory. Then they shift, my mind is engaged and I am looking at that mood from every angle, trying to capture it from every perspective. In one instance, my favorite position, the piece is sleepy, tender, open. In another, it is sharp, edgy, tensing already against the onslaught of the dogs who need to go out and the email that needs to be answered. Still again, it is spreading, flying, full of inarticulated and out of control promise. This is what I love about the wall art. Its like taking a photograph of a moment from every angle simultaneously so that ultimately, if you take the time to look, you can see the whole thing.