I've been doing some BIG watercolors lately with a lot of stencilled words on them. I mean we're talking here pieces of paper about 4 feet wide and six feet long all filled with words, every single square inch has a letter on it.
It's so much stencilling that I thought I might call up the stencil maker and see if they'd be interested in the finished product (Acme Stencil? Well, I'm your biggest fan!)
It's sorta fun to do, all this stencilling especially in the case where I don't really have to think about what I'm stencilling. But even if I'm writing something with some meaning, it's fun...
You're in this large piece of paper, you're kind of swimming in it it's so big and there you are putting a letter on it in some particular location on this big grid, it feels funny and kind of cool that somehow you've created some meaning out of this space to the point that you are directed to put this letter there.
And gradually gradually you begin to fill up the big space and the letters kind of lend a uniformity to the whole thing, they take a space that's full of marks and watercolor splashes and erasures and they sort of march over it, cleaning it up.
The overwhelming feeling that I get when I've finished the last stencil is "I did it!!!" I raise my hands over my head and I run around the room yelling (well, not really) celebrating in a way that I don't do for anything else.
And I say to myself, "I don't care if it's any good or not, it's done!!" And there's a whole of satisfaction in that, being done.
But, of course, if I don't like how it looks finally, just being done isn't gonna be enough, so in fact it isn't done and it won't be for awhile until I get it where I want it or I throw it away. It's a lot of work to throw away but if I can't get it to work, that's what I do (I'm warning you.)
I saw an article about artists and their mistakes and a lot of them said that they really don't think of it in a way as being a mistake, if there is something they don't like they just work until they like it.
And I agree with that. You could say in this big watercolor that I made a mistake because the thing is working very well, but to me it's just not done, it's not fixed up.
Being done (finally) is a good feeling.
