Sketches of Change

...Our social existence, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we had originally planned. The Guermantes Way, Part II Chapter 2

There is a scene in a Woody Allen movie, though which one I do not remember, in which a character explains that he may not do well in life but he does in art. I always though reality was over-rated and that the story is much better if you revise it slightly, sometimes for others, sometimes for yourself. There are friends who weave through my life, each time we are each altered. Joys from the past now seem juvenile. Current pursuits will dull, or maybe with practice become helpful habits.

I spent part of the past few months working on ideas that I thought were only useful to the moment and the task at hand. Recently I am beginning to see how I might allow that work to become a part of a necessary step in a project that had seemed totally separate. The papers come back out of the filing cabinet to be reshuffled on my desk and on my computer.

Sometimes the task seems more daunting than Vermeer suggests in his The Artist in his Studio of 1665. I often have to come at the work sideways, disturbed by it slightly as Rembrandt appears to be in his The Artist in His Studio, c 1629.

However it feels, life only appears fixed. I find myself in new situations only to realize they are oddly familiar, and that this time I can alter the color, dynamic, of an aspect because I know better, or simply because I am curious. Why not treat life as a picture to return to and reconsider? Why not sketch something new from the material at hand? Or, take an old thing and refine it? Whatever happens, no matter how intimidating, there is at least the exciting possibility that it will offer something more important, produced more wisely, than before.