Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Let It Go!

Let it Go!

We missed a good chance to win some money from AFV this past week. All it would have taken was a short clip of me decorating the Christmas cookies I made for my grandkids.



I was placing the tiny white sugar balls on the cookies with a pair of tweezers when the cuff of my shirt caught the lip of the jar. Had I put the cap back on? Heck no! 
What followed was a wave of tiny white balls rushing to the edge of the table as I yelled S^*%! They moved faster than the Israelites running through the parting of the Red Sea!  Trying to stop those balls were like trying to herd cats.  My husband came tearing down the hall coming to see what had torn such emotion from my lips, when I cautioned him to not step into the dining room. One look of the floor told us both we had had a snow storm of immense proportions. White balls were everywhere!  Suddenly I started to laugh….the idiocy of the situation was full in my face. How could I not laugh? I let it go.
I drew a parallel this morning as I was driving into town to get the one package I sent off this year. The care I had taken with the cookies was painstaking. The time was spent hoping to make my family and friend’s holidays a bit brighter, one bloody ball at a time. Sometimes painting is like that. You agonize over an edge, a stroke, a poorly drawn form, a seemingly false color value in the wrong place. The problems with some paintings just do not give you peace, even at night as you lay there thinking what on earth could you have done to have made that painting better. The stroke by stroke replay can leave you tossing. So when you view the painting in the morning you are determined to fix it or kill it. The painting, that is. Because by then you have deduced that the problem with your sleep pattern is not the too bright moon, the too late dessert, that last cup of coffee, no. It is the obsessive nature of a painter who demands from themselves that which their mind sees, but that their hand is not yet capable of producing. We all paint masterpieces in our minds.
What is the healthy direction then? What resolution is there for this obsession?  I have decided that it is to do the same thing as I did with those fugitive white balls. Throw it/them away. If I cannot improve it…..I can destroy it. Thereby keeping my sanity and maybe finding a new way to work. By not placing a label of precious on the thing, it has abdicated its power over me. I become the one with the power to create, refine, change and if desired, to destroy. Let it go. See no work as precious.
The cookies are done. Decorated with all their little doodads intact. The frosting has hardened and set…

The cap is on the jar of white balls. Tightened down. Twice.




Merry Christmas and a Blessed Season to all.