Big Ideas and Patience

The past two weeks or so have been very busy, and so this weekend, I made a point to relax a little. We spent some time with both sides of the family, which was really nice, and turned our attention to some household projects, since summer is the time for getting these things done. A nice little side effect of diverting my attention away from all the drawing, cutting, carving, printing, and hand-coloring that I'd like to do is that my mind is left to wonder and if I'm lucky, new ideas come flooding in. Well, that's just what happened this weekend. Recently, I've had two separate bodies of work going--a series with trees and other organic stuff, which is mainly fueled by process, and a figurative series that is about the feeling of a memory and hints of narrative. There is still a lot I want to do with both these series, but I think I also figured out how to weave together ideas and processes from both series, possibly in a third body of work. To me, this feels big and exciting, and I'm sort of afraid the ideas will fly out of my head before get them down. Well, I guess that's editing! The reality is that it will take me some time to follow through on these plans. It's not easy to be patient, but the beauty of printmaking is that there are many steps in the process. You can work on a project gradually, a little sketching here, a little carving there, and then eventually a big chunk of time for printing. It probably sounds strange, but this long process actually helps me to be more patient because I keep my hands and my head in the project, I'm immersed in it, and I'm not worried the ideas will disappear.