On Making

For every great piece that feels like it just floats from your brain to the paper, there are a ton of things made that got scrapped. Or things made for completely different reasons.

always collecting

I sanded and stained this table

Odds and ends, fits and starts, tips of tails or edges of claws just barely coming into view.  Pieces you shrug off and easily discard or slice up and glue into your sketchbook.

I forget about this and I'll be playing, noodling, fiddling for weeks, and then like magic, something beautiful arrives. A half-awake vision, the texture of a fabric, the repetition of stitches, an old photocopy you've been hauling in one of your millions of sketchbooks; it comes together in what feels like the most serendipitous way.

I forget that all the noodling was the exercising for this one; the work that needed to happen to bring me to this moment when the golden spark idea settles into the curves of my brain. And now I am contemplating not just the creative noodling I do everyday, working with my hands, that comes to bring that beautiful one idea, but it's the things I've experienced in my daily life.

There is a great conversation with  Elizabeth Gildert (of Eat Pray Love fame) on Radiolab.