As Fleeting as a Bird Cloud

Even the birds were celebrating this 72 degree day on the beach, with their bird cloud dances. I just had to put my toes in the sand and water.

One from my latest tangent.

This morning I added the TED Talks blog to my Google Reader, so I can have a steady diet of inspired dialog. The talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity really hit a big bullseye for me.

Why? Well, I negotiate a relationship with my creative process every day. Some days I am raring to go, even into the night. Other days I am afraid to pick up a brush for fear of "ruining" a painting in process. And most of the time, even when I think I have a goal, I usually end up taking off on a tangent that winds up a distant cousin to where I thought I was going. I laugh at my current body of work, it's all over the place!

I work in series, several pieces at a time. And lately I am jumping back and forth between series as well, doing 10 tiny 2" blocks at once, then doing 4 canvases, and then back to blocks. Throw in some sand photos in the middle and you have an idea of my creative process. I like it that way, and I always learn something that feeds the next piece. What throws me is that I have so many elements or ideas or techniques or mediums to explore that usually things get left behind. I'll get into circles in one series, lines of dots the next, then leaves the next.

I experiment. And I work quickly. When my stay here in Wildwood is over, I will have enough new work for several shows, a retrospective on my Winter in Wildwood. And by then, of course, I will be off onto another tangent.