"Reservations"-Five

I'm a little late in getting this post out. We went to Maine for the weekend and had some packing to do, so anything I wanted to say about this piece after just having worked on it has faded a bit. I'm going to post anyway, though it may be brief... or not.

Creating this piece hasn't been as easy as "How Much Time Have You Got?"—that one kind of just spilled out onto my surface. This one is a lot of pulling and pushing. Sometimes I think it's going one way, but then it doesn't seem to make sense, so I pull it another way—back and forth like that, that's how it seems to be with me.

You'll have to forgive the quality of the image. I took the photo by a window, so there's a bit of a reflection coming in on the left side. I'll try to get a better one next time.

Okay, so what do we have going on since the last time? Well, the designer in me is starting to get more involved, so I'm looking for flow. Catholic-school-boy in the hat was just a little too eye-catching, so I'm toning him down a bit.

I spent a lot of time working on the axe. I'm still not quite sure why he's carrying it, but there it is. So I was working—I made a blade, painted over some of the words, made a wooden handle—and the more axe-like I tried to make it, the less it made sense. Nothing in this image is real, why should I believe that the axe would be? At that point I decided to just cover it. And what did I choose? Flowers. What the heck kind of axe is that?

And numbers—again with the numbers—they're not quite right. One of them will go, or change. But I like words and pictures, or maybe I like pictures (almost always of people) and symbols, so that's why you see them—my work needs to have them.

I like the squiggly lines I added to Pinocchio's chest last time. They look like my chest feels when I get anxious. I'm not sure that I'll do anything to change them. Maybe I'll just look at them for a while, and maybe they'll let me tone them down soon.

On another note, this weekend my grandmother wandered off for the first time. She left her house in the middle of the night and went walking, confused (maybe that's her up there in the corner at the end of the path). She's okay—not hurt, but it's obvious that decisions need to be made. Tomorrow it will be eleven years since my grandfather died. He was a bit of an artist himself, and I loved him dearly.