Tuesday 21 May 2013

Becalmed by doubt

For the last few days I have stopped sailing easily forward towards my creative horizon and been becalmed by Doubt. About whether I have chosen the right way to express my theme; that my piece will end up being twee and reveal my English soul in all its narrowness; that I should have taken the abstraction one step further, or done more planning before I started making.

It may be that the abstraction idea has some merit, and that given more time I could have 'started again' in this direction. I suspect that this will end up in my sketchbook in one form or another over the next weeks. I think I am not, and could never enjoy being, the kind of person who does all the planning up front. I want to make things and see how it looks, or feels, or in this case, sounds! Like Thomas Heatherwick I like to make models and prototypes because it gives me more feel for the materials and their potential. But also, like now, because it allows me to step back and see where I have missed expressing the thing I wanted to express.

Looking back on this vision- and Vision-expaanding course I can see a series of moments like this, when I reassessed what I was doing and found it somehow unsatisfying. And from this perspective what I see is that every time, whether it resulted in any change in direction or not, experiencing Doubts in this way always opened the door to new ideas and improvements in the final piece.


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