It’s a creative thing. Maybe that’s it. I leave it, and then I rebuild it. I start over. The light wasn’t right, the objects weren’t connecting, the lines weren’t fluid. I sculpt and whittle, I arrange and place, I move and adjust pieces into form and feeling. It’s an outline of the window frame, dressed with curiosities picked up from sand and soil and pavement. It’s the table and chair that say sit here, now, and do. It becomes the poetry slipping out from the nib scratching inky words across the paper that waits. It becomes a watercolor painting, a bleeding of tears and rain. It becomes a mosaic of color and texture that follows the laws of spiral and spine.
It starts with bolts of fabric that fall around my feet: deep and shallow blues moving recklessly within parameters of measured cuts; green spears of wild unchartered forest reaching and yawing upward. Random patterns that seize my breath, colors that stir into recognition a memory, forms that dredge the beds of mystery. Flowered patterns of complimentary colors that enrich and spark and then change from their original states into something new. I find the main grain of the fabric, the strong, tight thread lines running forward, up, and off its measured piece into the space where imagination works. Perpendicular to these vertical threads, the softer weft threads stretch their way over and under the vertical warp threads. One forgiving, the other less. One strong, the other weak. Together, they hold each other in place. The grain of a textile, the grain of muscle, the grain of a blade, leaf, stalk. The grain running through branches and trunks of pine, oak, fir. The grain swimming through rocks of marble and granite. Grains hold us in place. They weld movement with stasis.
But from each of the fabrics I cut right through the grain. 2×2 inch squares of fabric lay in fragmented life on the table, bleeding out. The thread lines of strength that hold the elements together fall apart. But cutting against the grain wakens me to the breath stealing risk of what if, of what else. I put piece to piece, I move this color with that, this pattern to that, this form with that. Once the grain is found, the art flows like the small creeks that find brooks, that find rivers, that find ocean currents. If the colors fold and kiss, a shape emerges. You’ll recognize it as something familiar or something that scratches and pulls away from your grain. But follow it – the one you’ve made now. Where does it need to go? Let it wander around the wall that you’ve created space for. Let it grow like a sapling, like a child that you follow with attentive eyes and soft hands – allowing it its space to grow into its grain.
I stand back to see what I’ve made. The assembled pieces of fabric create a landscape that breaks away from the confines of my earlier vision. From color, texture, and grain, a place is founded; it settles in. It’s in a harmony that all life can recognize. I want to walk into this place, stay here. Because my heart finds stillness here and my feet find rest and the table and chair say sit here now, and be.
Write Down the Road 