Poetica Magazine

I have this mosaic piece I'm working on in my art room.  It's a somewhat surrealistic portrait on canvas board and the poor guy has been stagnating for weeks now.  First I didn't have enough tiles for his wild and crazy Einstein-type hair so I stopped for awhile and shopped eBay for some more.  Then I had to wait for them to show up, unpack them, and arrange them. 

Then I ran into difficulty on what, exactly, his face should be made out of.  Should it be the larger sheets of glass I have?  Should he be blue or purple or milky white, or maybe a mixture of many types of colored glass so he's multi-ethnic?  Or maybe he should be checkerboard, two different colors alternating? 

Here's what happens with pieces I'm working on:  when I don't get the answers right, I stop working on them so hard.  I let my subconcious guide the way, or I work on another part of the piece, hoping that the troublesome part will work itself out when the time comes.  But there's a wholeness to each piece and I know it's supposed to come together in the end a certain way, to have a feeling and a rightness to it, but if I go with expediency or with just what I have on hand and not the essential right choice, I'll end up with something very wrong and want to throw it out.

Most writing isn't as permanent as Mosaic work.  Once I glue something down on a canvas, that's it.  Once that's done, any mind-changing is done.  If I don't like it, there's nothing I can do.  A story that's just been written can be changed.  The computer allows unbelievable fluidity of changes; changes that can occur because of punctuation, titles, paragraphs added or deleted, and capitals yelling or italics whispering.

But just like art, there's a wholeness to a poem, to an essay, to a memoir, that needs to be right. 

Both types of struggles remind me that sometimes the work doesn't flow.  No matter how much I'm trying, no matter how hard I'm working at it, taxing my brain and outthinking my art, sometimes nothing is going to work.  Then I need to let it sit, to ferment, on its own.  The work is bored with me and I am bored with the work.  At the very least, I need to look at it with new eyes in the morning.

And by remembering to do this - by knowing when to say enough is enough - I get to something better each time.  Something finished.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor