The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m going to let you in on a little secret:  I don’t consider myself much of an artist.  I’m around people who are … so maybe I know the difference.  I never studied art, never took an art class, couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag or even one of those recyclable totes I keep forgetting to bring into the grocery store.  Creating designs for my glass commissions is akin to extracting my own teeth with a pliers.

Take this latest.  Twenty plus years ago we built the Camano Island Visitor Center and I put a 15 foot by 12 foot mural of colorful glass in the front — which is now on life support after bullets, bottles thrown from passing cars and lawnmower rocks have shattered and broken most of the panels.  I suppose, when the new folks who now own the decommissioned Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center asked me about repairing it, I could have walked away.  Or I could have repaired the thing.  But no, I offered to build them a new window.  New design, new glass, for free ….

Oddly enough, they accepted my offer.  So now I’m scratching my head, noodling with design concepts, tossing away my summer, but here’s the deal.  I still haven’t designed anything I particularly like.  After a hundred sketches.  A good artist, a real artist, would sit down, draw on skills and talent and inspiration and voila, pop out a masterpiece.  Or at least something to wow the commuters on their hellish drive back onto the island.

But me, not so much.  Sure, I could make excuses — after all, I’m 72 years old, the well’s maybe going dry, maybe if I was younger, more energetic, but the truth is, it’s always been like this for me, a struggle and a slog.  I could build the damn mural faster than what it takes to come up with a design.

I guess at this late date the only course left to me is keep on keeping on.  You can introspect yourself into a dozen corners, you can develop stage fright, you can decide to throw in the towel and the paint brush too … but sometimes you just have to put those doubts aside and do what you can, maybe the stars will align, maybe the inspiration will land on your shoulder, maybe you’ll realize you’re not Picasso and maybe he had his own doubts.  Okay, probably he didn’t ….

Hits: 18

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2022 at 2:49 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.