Til I Shine

So late in posting tonight!  I blame overtime at work...hooray for the money, boo.hiss.hiss. for taking time away from me that I reserve for art!  Seeing how, including this post, I'm only 3 days away from posting every day in December, I wasn't going to let the lateness of the hour deter me!

Down to brass tacks then...

I found this song, "Calvary Cross" by Richard Thompson:

It happened by accident the other day while searching for a different song....but it stuck in my head and I've been listening to it a good bit.

Contrary to what it may sound like, this song is not religious...it's actually talking about creative inspiration!

The part that struck a chord with me is talking about putting the effort into learning your craft...working hard in order to improve, and I liked it so much I wanted to put the lyrics in a page:

"Scrub me til I shine in the dark."

I was thinking about how sometimes our dissatisfaction with our art (or our lives in general for that matter) is the factor that motivates us to try to change.  But it's not always the case.  We can be dissatisfied and do nothing about it...just wallow in it.

The scrubbing only happens when we start to work against the thing that we find distasteful.  If we don't push against that abrasive feeling we have about something, then we'll never get polished up and pretty, you know?

That gelly roll  pen worked surprisingly well on the kraft paper!  I see more of the white on kraft in my future!

I think one of the best ways to use the abrasion of dissatisfaction is when you let it be a motivator to try something different...to experiment with something you've never tried before.  It can be a hideous mess, or it can turn out to be something totally awesome...but either way, stepping outside the familiar in some small way seems to always lead to the discovery of something good...maybe not the first or second time, but somewhere down the line, bad will lead to bad will lead to bad will lead to good...and that's a result that makes continued effort worthwhile.

I hope that in the new year some of the things that have been abrading me for a while will finally have polished me to the point of shining.