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There’s always something in the works. When you’re a creative person, that’s what you say, that’s what people say about you, that’s what people think. If you’re a visual artist, it is of course expected. If you’re a writer, I suppose it is too, but it is harder to nail down. To state the obvious, on some level, I am always thinking about writing something. A sentence, a chapter, a poem, just the right phrase.
Walks in the woods for me, yes, even walks across town, to and from work, are complicated for me.
I’m always in conversation, but most of that is with myself, in my own head. I look at leaves, fungi, moss, trees, tracks, wildlife and the tangible parts of weather through the lens of how I might write about them or what they inspire at the time. I am both easily distracted and fully engaged. I’m there, step by step with you or alone and I’m also distant, absent, gone.
Sometimes I leave and end up in the Shire. Walking with Tolkien’s little folk or just sitting and enjoying a second breakfast. I’m walking under the trees at night waiting for the stars to come out and begin singing. I’m blowing smoke rings with my back to a favorite tree, thinking. I might be having a pint at the “Green Dragon.”
However, when you’re also a visual artist, you can’t help thinking about your mediums of paint and ink and in my case not just paper and canvas but wood. Functional folk art in the form of fishing decoys and fishing lures is wildly creative and limited only by my imagination. So this past summer when I was walking through town and spotted a new broom head with blue plastic bristles with a shattered handle in a dumpster, I salvaged it. I knew I could give those bristles a new life. They would never sweep a floor, but they’d wake up to a new destiny.
Something was in the works. As you might imagine, when there’s always something in the works, there’s always a lot of unfinished business. For some readers, that might be unthinkable, it might be that you need to finish what you’ve started, complete the task at hand and then move on. But, bear with me, think about the unthinkable… if you don’t have a pile of uncompleted works of art, paintings, novels, poems, or whatever your artform is, then there’s not really anything “always in the works,” is there?
]And, when a decoy is carved, weighted, swim tested, primed, painted and sealed, is it complete or just ready to go to work? When it brings in its first northern pike, slow under the ice and then -- in the hole faster than the blink of an eye with flashing sharp teeth to bite, is it finished then? Do the teeth marks make it complete, do they change it to something else. What if your spear grazes the nose of it?
Some of us love to check things off the check lists. We checked ourselves off years and maybe even decades ago. Finished with that and prepared for adulthood. Created and made with and for a purpose. With life and with art, thought, I’ve always considered both, at least my own, as works of art. In progress and somehow, yes, too, complete at each stage. If some things never make it past the incubation stage, the idea on paper, or rough carving stage are they any less valuable? The simple lines of a sketch, the fragment of poetry, the opening lines of a potential novel. Good stuff.
Maybe not a second breakfast, but full of potential and pretty interesting as they remain.
With something always in the works, I’ve got plenty to look forward to. The possibilities are endless and for me that’s inspiring, that’s worth the journey. It also makes me open to trying something new or any number of new ideas.
If you aren’t artistic but enjoy the art forms of others, try keeping a journal in which you simply write down observations, ideas or what you like about the books you read, the art you view in the upcoming Ely Art Walk or even the art you purchase for your own enjoyment. Write down little notes about the movies and music you watch and listen to. If nothing else it’ll be a source for some good conversation you can enjoy with friends and family in the coming years that doesn’t have to do with the news or politics. Who knows, your entries might just end up being something in the works.
As I write this it is snowing again, one of my cats is curled between my legs and the other one is on the back of my couch, snoring behind me. There’s a story there… at least a poem. I have a lot of “somethings” in the works and I’m dreaming up paint jobs for a certain frog decoy.
