unknowing
A fellow collage maker told me recently that they’ve come to a point now where they only glue down a composition if it excites them. Maybe that’s confidence, or certainty. Maybe it’s what happens when you’re intuition starts operating sure-footedly. I don’t know what you’d call that point, honestly. I don’t know how you’d come to it, or what it would take to arrive there. Part of me is envious, and wonders what it might be like to create things from that place, but another part of me doesn’t want to.
I’m not saying I don’t experience excitement in the process of creating. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it when I do. It’s just that it’s not the thing that drives me to make and keep making. It’s not the thing that pushes and prods me to keep doing what I do. Instead, it’s tension and contention. It’s discord and dissonance. It’s the un-knowing ambiguity. It’s the uneasy comfort of sitting within a contradiction and finding something akin to peace within the uncertainty.
“We make art from our flaws, fragilities, perversities,” Jerry Saltz says, “from our need to communicate” the inexpressible depths of our damage and longing, our desperate needs and our tender frailties. Or, at least, that’s how it is for me.
Everything I make is born in hesitation and questioning. In doubt and impulsivity. Somewhere between fear and trembling. Between reverence and anxiety. I glue things down not because I’m sure they belong there but because I’m afraid of what might happen if I don’t. I’m afraid of losing momentum. Of losing the courage, nerve, and bravery that arrives within the willingness to fail boldly. Afraid that if I wait for it to feel right or perfect or exciting I’ll never make anything. And I refuse, I refuse, I refuse, I refuse, to let entropy, apathy, and atrophy have the final say.
Sometimes it’s the wrong turns that take you to a place more interesting. Sometimes it’s fumbling in the frightened-dark that brings you to something better than you could have ever imagined.
May every uncertain step lead you closer to the creating you most need.
May the darkened unknowing guide you to what you most need to see.
May even your trembling hands always have strength enough to make things.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
I think that not gluing down a collage is like not pushing the shutter release on a camera.
Wow! Just wow!!!