My friend and I are having a conversation about painting. Out of that conversation came two thoughts that I expounded on, and which I'd like to share here.
Composition
Such a difficult concept to pull off, especially as I am a Naïve Abstractionist. I want my work to have great composition, to become a true, whole composition, but I still feel like I'm blindly stabbing my fingers at the keyboard, hoping that I'll form a proper chord. Honestly, it is terrifying to stare at that blank canvas, and sometimes I get so nervous I paint something dreadful. The fear is great, but the reward for the risk is worth 10 missed paintings. There's a scene in Searching For Bobby Fisher (a favorite film of mine) where Vinnie talks to Josh, trying to sway him away from Bruce's conservative teaching style:
Vinnie: He taught you how not to lose, not how to win.
You got to risk losing. You got to risk everything.
You got to go to the edge of defeat.
Josh: But--
Vinnie: But what? Play.
This captures a lot of what I go through. It is so hard to risk losing, even though I know that a missed painting is just a minimal waste of a buck's worth of paint and a four-dollar canvas. Certainly the lessons learned in a missed painting are worth at least five bucks. Still, it's hard, because a missed painting cuts so much deeper, as though I've failed. And that feeling is very hard to shake. Which is good, because if I was totally together and whole of ego, life would be very boring.
Balance
I start out a painting with a concept of colors, with a vaporous idea of my palette. As paint hits canvas, I immediately begin to suss out what the final painting will look like. As I get closer to happy, I shift away from thoughts of palette and towards thoughts of balance. In the end, no matter how much the painting might miss, I feel that I can rescue it by keeping it balanced.
3 Comments:
I go through some of the same thoughts when songwriting. I'll just be banging out chord progressions and it all sounds like dreck, but then I hit something new and interesting and BANG! It's like an explosion in my head and it makes whatever time I've invested up until that point all worthwhile.
That's the juice, that moment when it happens. All of the pain up to that moment is wiped away, as if it didn't exist.
Are your songs available for public consumption?
My songs used to be available, but only in bars, small clubs, and at high school dances. The few recordings I have of my time in bands are better left for me to listen to in off moments and pretend I was a bigger deal than I was :-)
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