Sandstone Sky

The brilliance of fall, of cottonwoods and aspens alight against a deep blue sky, the warm flow of blood through my legs in direct contrast to the sharp bite of wind on my face, the smoke from my burning weeds graying the clouds, their flames dancing in the bin, the deep exhalation of everything that has grown, fulfilled itself and is finally spent consumes me. I am drawn to the ordered chaos of the world around me. Broken sticks on the ground in the forest, the perfect graduated color palate of the Bosque, the sandstone textured clouds of the sunset last night inspire me and I have been thinking that I should sculpt those downed branches or mimic the texture of that sky. But these thoughts beg a question. How, if I am mimicking in my art a world that already exists, am I truly creative?

To create is to bring into being, or cause to exist. I do not cause the sky. I do not bring those downed branches into being. If I were to recreate the beauty of the natural world, I would be able to freeze it, know it again and again from different times and parts of myself. But in doing so, I run the risk of rendering me merely a spectator by objectifying and reducing that which is so fully alive, so huge, to something manageable and separate from myself.

Art, for me, must be something that is itself huge and fully alive, something that I not only witness but also interact with, something that, like nature, has the power to transform me. In spite of all my yearning toward beauty, the sculpture must also have meaning, its own ordered construct where the random textures and smooth colored swirls speak to a whole that is at once recognizable and new. That, for me, is the creative process. Out of the vortex of myriad sensations and drifting thoughts as I revel in a sandstone sky comes the mysterious allure of texture and color, light and shadow, feeling and idea that are not themselves objects but instead are the gestating parts of a whole not yet formed, only promised.