Something Serendipitous

More often than not, for me, something artful comes from a completely unexpected place. 

Much as I'd like to think that I can plan each piece, barely any work of art that suits me on completion comes out part and parcel from any sort of immediately distinct vision. It's true that, generally, I have an idea at the outset--either a complete scene, or most of it--but where it goes from there is anyone's guess as much as it is my own. 

Floating Blossoms

For instance, I'll start by creating some sort of color wash, but then, something else often takes shape that I couldn't predict. Perhaps a tiny sail boat appears on a still ocean-view, or a house crops up among daisies. 

One of my more recent works started out as a blue wash which could have morphed into anything from a watery scene to a landscape. It sat for at least a week while I tended to the daily grind. At best, I'd give it a quick glance, but for more than a few days I'd had no time to sit quietly before it to see what belonged in that space. At last, though, up cropped a layer of cherry blossom petals atop a very still pond. 

Today's creation started as a colorful pastel that I decided to turn monochromatic once I'd scanned it. I'd started with an image set in the daytime; but when I looked at it onscreen, the sturdy lighthouse at the center seemed to tell me that this was really an evening study, and that it needed some light piercing the darkness. 

So I returned the piece literally to the drawing board, and swept a swath of light from the lighthouse peak out across the early morning sky. I re-scanned and swapped the image to monochrome once again, adjusted the photo curves to darken specific areas of the scene and, at last, the resulting image felt right to me. 

My favorite artistic surprise happened a few months ago, starting with a piece of sandpaper. Not just any sandpaper, but the kind made for drawing with pastels. Yes; they actually make sandpaper on which you draw--in different weights no less. I'd not had any experience with this sort of paper though and, silly me, instead of using it to see how it went, I decided to use it to rough up some too-smooth art stock so I could use that with pastels. It seemed like a practical idea at the time, anyway. 

With purpose, I took the cream colored sandpaper and rubbed it on the too-slick black drawing paper and voila! I mean, OOPS! The black paper was not sanded enough, and now the sandpaper had gray blotches on it. 

Reach

When I looked at the sandpaper more closely, however, I began to see a man's arm reaching in from the left side of the paper. Maybe there's a picture here, already, I thought. I noticed a larger blotch going nearly top to bottom on the right side, but I couldn't make out anything, so I put the paper on a music stand (i.e., creative props are interchangeable), and decided I'd have a look every once in a while to see what I might eventually see. 

After several weeks, the last few of which I'd not looked at the sandpaper for about a week or so, I finally saw the entire drawing. It simply needed me to put in some outlines to finish it, adding a bit more blotching to finish the man's coat and add that last far-left fold of the woman's dress. Then I had to add the man's hand, which for some unforeseen reason seemed to take me nearly as long as it might to begin the whole thing from scratch, and that made me laugh. I could not figure out how that should look, other than subtle, just as the woman's hand is subtle. 

In all, much of what appears as shading was already there from the sanding event; I just had to see it and outline it, adding a few strokes and a bit more rendering to complete the scene. I am especially fond of its mystery: The woman's right arm looks as if it's extended upward, for example. 

These sorts of serendipity pieces are my favorites. It seems there is a sheer wisdom in the flow of not knowing in art as well as in life--of seeing what at first seems obscured, but suddenly, at just the right moment, is absolutely unmistakable to the creative eye.