May 28, 2004
Happy in The Land of the Un-done.
As an artist, I am happiest while in process. I am content to be thinking about what needs to occur to make a piece feel done. When a piece is finished, I enjoy it, am glad I made it, but it has lost it's impedous. I am no longer compelled by it.
When I first joined my current quilt guild, I set up a table to encouage folks to participate in a surface design challenge. Each month I created hand outs describing surface design techniques such as, bleach discharge, stamping, dyeing, and foiling.
As I had not confirmed if setting up a surface design challenge was OK, I fretted when the president came to me asking what the end result of my challenge was. Boy-Did I fumble in answering that one! There was no end result. The idea was to encourage the process of surface design. I hadn't created a mystery quilt to assemble at the end of four differing techniques!
It was around this time that I labeled myself as a Process Person.
What about you? Are you at home in the land of the un-done? Can you stand ~~~ambiguity~~~? Is everything good in the world when you have a piece of unfinished journal art, quilt art, knitting?
This page isn't quite finished. It needs more patterning... Now I have something to think about while bored at work! :)
In my day-to-day other life I teach computing studies to high school students. It involves lots of different theory and processes like computer programming, computer graphics and web page design. The boys that I used to teach were quite happy to hack away at things, discovering the process of using programming languages or using JavaScript and HTML. Their end products were often not brilliant but they would go off on a tangent to learn more about the process. The girls, on the other hand, respond much better, if I give them an end product to work towards and only learn as much of the process as they need to achieve the end product.
I am not saying that all boys and all girls follow this pattern as I have lots of examples of the opposite but, as a general rule, from my observation boys are process driven while girls are product driven.
"undone" makes me feel anxious and weird...like when I'm in the middle of a really good book and I have to put it aside to walk the dog, make dinner, go to work, answer the phone etc...
sometimes I am afraid (AFRAID!?) to start a new project knowing that I will be distracted and lose the thread...
this probably all began when I started having babies..(youngest is now 10 and not so needy), but boy oh boy was I thrown for a loop with baby #1(18 years ago!)....all manner of MY time became twisted and unreasonable..you'd think by now I'd have gotten the hang of it..
...almost...maybe...
...Fern
Posted by: fern at May 29, 2004 01:35 PMcan you just come over and make a mural of all your journal entries in every room?? i feel your images so strong, lovely, dammit!
some things i'm a process person about, especially when i'm in my own little world which i prefer...when i feel that the 'world' (or editor!) will be seeing my work, particularly writing, i become an result person. which is why i think nature built in a natural introversion in my personality!! not to mention, hmmm, with me, is it i'm a process person or PROcrastination person?? heheh!--- judgement, even postive criticism, affects me so adversely, walking that line between hiding from criticism and productive creativity is tricky for me...*sigh*
Posted by: andrea at May 31, 2004 02:39 PM