Ride the Wave
It’s not often during the creative process I legitimately feel like another energy and force takes over and makes the moves for me. You hear about athlete’s getting into the “zone” and I think there’s also such a state for people creating art. Whether it’s music, literature, digital or visual art, that area exists within us all. It’s a creative wave that percolates within our souls when expressing emotion and when that wave hits the crest, hope to hell you’ve got the insight to take it all in and see where the wave breaks and the shore ends.
Dani Rojas, A character from the T.V. show “Ted Lasso” has a mantra he says throughout the show, “football is life” which can also be applied to art. “Art is life,” is no joke. Everyone, and I mean everyone has art within their soul. What you want to do with it, is entirely up to you. And being able to identify with it plays a huge factor as well. Sometimes discovering a love for creating art happens by accident. But when you find it, the possibilities are endless as there are no boundaries in art.
My last piece, “Spring Bloom Anew,” was one of those waves I was fortunate to catch and ride back to shore. I had so much emotion and energy within that it almost felt like a concert of the senses and I was the conductor trying to bring all the instruments together to create a moment on canvas. The moment your soul steps out of your body and catches a glimpse of the process that you don’t have a ton of control over but just enough to know when to hop off the wave. It was exhilarating! I was buzzing so hard from the moment after creating the piece I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stopped the process with the piece and stared at it for hours thinking I may want to add more and hop back on the wave.
Understanding when to stop the creative process and self-edit is so crucial. I have challenges self-editing and before I added more to “Spring Bloom Anew,” I reached out to one of my best friends for some of his thoughts on my piece as it stood. My friend is super creative and someone I connect with on an artistic and spiritual level and value his opinion immensely. He said, “I would NOT go back into that…. it’s perfect!” I stopped, and he was right. What I had created was enough. It captured the moment and now that moment is gone. But it’s not, as it’s now on canvas forever. I was so emotionally spent that I cried.
I guess my big takeaway in this journey is that when you see the wave, ride it and see where it takes you. You might get gobbled up and washed ashore. But sometimes if you’re lucky, you may ride it back to shore. It’s risky but well worth the reward.