Small Change
‘Swampy’. That’s the word a friend used to describe my palette. She wasn’t wrong and I wasn’t offended. I couldn’t be offended because as a stained glass artist her whole world is about clarity and color. Besides, she was right. My last body of work leaned toward variations of sepia with a smidge of mud thrown in for good measure. But still. Swampy? A gauntlet was thrown and I accepted the challenge, purchased a few blocks of pigmented encaustic wax and as I watched them soften into puddles of bright, primary colors asked myself, ‘what the heck am I supposed to do with this?’
I’m learning as I go. It’s not easy. I’m not a painter, and the pigments want me to paint. And so I regress back to what I know I can control. I choose papers similar in chroma to the melted pigments. The result feels garish and unsophisticated. I long for my swampy neutrals! I might be learning as I go but it’s a very steep curve. But I guess, on reflection, it’s also a metaphor for life. Every day we’re alive is another day of ‘learning as we go’. Somehow I find that comforting.
Nevertheless it has been a bumpy few weeks as I consider the work I need for my show in October. I know I’m over-thinking. Trying too hard. I need to relax. To stop striving. To have fun and to learn how to play again. Creating isn’t about me hoping the next piece of art is better than the last. It’s about me being in the moment. It’s about problem solving. There’s no doubt creating is hard work but when we step out of our own way it is joyful hard work. Creating requires proper technique — or in my case, a close proximity to proper technique. But it also requires a fearlessness that allows us to trust our intuition. Creating asks for us to believe that the story we are trying to tell is worth telling. That the changes we are trying to manifest are positive.
Every moment of our too short ‘learn as you go’ life is an act of creation. Every choice is a catalyst that sets in motion the conditions for change and the opportunity to create something new.
What choices will you make today? What will you create?
As I wrote those words I realized that the body of work I’m attempting to create will hang in an October exhibit that ends days before the next chapter of this beautiful and flawed country begins. So the choices I make today are not focused on art alone. As we race toward November I want to make choices that build my reserves of strength and resilience so that the overheating chemical soup that is my brain’s mosh pit doesn’t boil over. I want to make choices that keep me steady. Grounded. Even-tempered. And if those choices support the creation of art — great. But that’s not my priority. My priority is figuring out how my choices can become a catalyst for change. I’ll settle for small change. Because collectively, our small change will add up.
To that end, I’m going to choose to remain informed by reliable sources so that I have facts to back up my beliefs. I’m going to choose to support Vote Forward, either by writing letters or contributing funds to help cover postage. I’m going to choose to listen to others speak without interrupting — even those who may have beliefs that differ from my own.
We are living through a period of time where others are pushing us to become untethered from our truth. Treating us like frogs in a pot of slowly heating water, the voices that have hijacked one of our country’s political parties want to see us lose our ability to separate fact from fiction. They want to see us blind with anger. This is a time to remain calm and to live by the courage of our convictions.
So again I ask, what choices will you make today? What will you create? What act or conversation will be a catalyst for change? And I’ll remind us all: small change matters.
