Better, Worse, or Just the Same?

In a recent post, I mentioned that I wasn't happy with the first of three pieces that I did for a client.  I had hoped to send her photos of at least three, so that she could choose one to go with two others she had already purchased.  So I added some plants on both sides, interrupting and covering most of that big horseshoe-shaped area on the bottom, which I felt was competing too much with the focal point.

       Is it better, worse, or just
              the same?







 Sometimes I debate with myself over whether I've actually improved the piece when I make changes like this.  Often I wonder if what I'm putting in is as good as what I'm taking out.  Was it better before?  Was it worth the risk of losing what I covered up?  At these times I hear the eye doctor's voice echoing in my head, "Is it better, worse, or just the same?"  Looking at an eye chart, though, the choice is usually far more obvious.

In life, as in art, the choices are not often so clear.  So, what do you do?  If we doubt all our choices too much, indecision can easily turn into paralysis.  The outcomes of this type of thinking are that you do nothing, which is a waste of your talent and precious time, or that you let circumstances and/or others make your decisions for you.  And believe me, you might not like the ones they make.

Of course, major life decisions are much more difficult to make than choosing what to glue onto a collage.  If you don't like what you've done to a piece of art, you can glue something else on, tear something off, paint over it, or cut it up and reuse the pieces.  If you make a bad choice in life, you have to live with it, literally.  For many of us, this thought is pretty scary.  Lately, I have found decision-making of any kind daunting.  For example, I'm seemingly unable to figure out what direction I want to take with my work.  This is not a life-or-death decision, so why is it giving me so much trouble? 

                                                                  photos by Colin Reusch

In his article, You Cannot Choose the Wrong Path, Stephen Mills writes, "You can’t possibly know what experiences you would have had if you had chosen differently.  Life is too contingent for that kind of after-the-fact-it-might-have-been obsessing."  He sheds more light on this subject in another post, Why You Should be More Decisive:
"When you spend too much time analyzing a decision, you are usually less satisfied with whatever decision you end up making.  People who consider more factors when making decisions are more likely to worry later that they didn’t make the right decisions.  So they agonize during the decision making process and then worry even after they’ve made a decision."  Yup, that's me.

I like the way Larry Crane puts it:  "Often, it is not the end action that creates the most fear; it is the decision to act or not act. Since life offers no guarantees and you would never know that your decision would be wrong until you have made it, then you might as well let go of all of your fear, take the risk, and decide. It is definitely better than keeping yourself in limbo. Although it is true that one wrong turn could get you seemingly lost, it could also be that such a turn could be an opportunity for an adventure, and even open more fantastic roads. It is all a matter of perspective. You have the choice between being a lost traveler or an accidental tourist of life. You have the choice to let go of your fear of deciding."

IT IS ALL A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE.   Can someone remind me of that every three seconds or so?

 OK, these are the three pieces I'm sending to my customer:

Transformation 41

 Transformation 42

Transformation 43

                                                           

That's my final answer.  I'm not phoning a friend.                       

By George, I think she's got it!

I have actually reached my stated goal of having these two pieces finished by today!  Unfortunately, the weather would not cooperate, so the photos aren't the greatest, but here they are.

Transformation 41

Ingredients: monotype prints using oil-based litho inks on Rives BFK paper, Caran D'Ache crayons, watercolor pencils, acrylic gel medium, PVA glue

I think of this one as the seed entering the earth, hopefully completing a trilogy with the other two pieces the client bought.  When I posted this piece before, a couple of people felt it could use more "rootiness" (thanks for the word, Don), and I agreed that it needed something on the bottom to balance it out.  I tried about 47 million different things, and this seemed to work best.  Okay, I could be exaggerating a bit, but it felt like 47 million.  I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with it, but this how it will remain unless/until I think of something better.

 Butterfly Buddha Child

Ingredients:  FW acrylic ink, maps, book pages, chiri paper, watercolor pencil, Caran D'Ache crayons, ginko leaves, metallic oil crayon, metallic paint pen, Rives BFK paper, on Multimedia Art Board

 Butterfly Buddha Child- detail

Butterfly Buddha Child- detail

Sorry about the wonky photos, but I hope you enjoy these nonetheless!

Art on Demand (RecyclingTime)

I've been trying (I emphasize trying, here) to work on something for a woman who bought two pieces from my ongoing Transformations Series back in the Fall.  She had originally wanted three, but when she went back to get them, someone had come in and bought the one she wanted.  She didn't like the pieces that were left in the gallery, so the gallery owner put her in touch with me.  I sent her photos of the remaining pieces I had, but none of them were really what she was looking for, and didn't go well with the ones she bought.  So I told her I'd come up some things that might fit the bill, send her some more photos, and hopefully she'd choose one of them.  No problem, right?  Wrong.

I'm finding it more of a challenge than I'd imagined.  For one thing, I usually just make whatever strikes me at the moment, with no particular goal in mind except to make something.  If it fits into the series, fine; if not, fine.  But now I have to limit myself to a specific size, color scheme, and subject matter. She wants something with plants, and the colors need to coordinate well with the other two pieces.

Here are the ones she has:

        Transformation 12

          Transformation 22

So I fiddled around with some things for a couple of weeks, but nothing came of it except some wasted time and considerable frustration.  What to do, what to do?  Time to recycle!  I had some old monotypes in my "scrap works" drawer that I'd been avoiding cutting up for collage, probably because I had harbored some subconscious notion that I'd be able to "fix them", and maybe shouldn't give up on them just yet.  But, being uninspired, and running low on good collage material, I finally said "what the hell" and threw them into the bathtub on Friday.  Yes, I did say the bathtub.  My old pieces have various  mixed media layered onto the monotype surface, and much of it is water based.  I can't get everything off, but after it has soaked for a while, I wipe off as much as I can.

I've come up with one new piece so far; here it is:

    Transformation 41

I think it could use more work, but this is what I have so far.  I have two questions.  One, what else does it need?  And two, does it "go with" the other two?  Thanks, in advance, for your help!