doodling in watercolours, revised

 the perfect model, the right tools, non-judgemental mindset, et voilà:

Addendum March 28:

As I grow older (omg here she goes, again!) I have come to appreciate ambiguity.

I will attempt an explanation, although that in itself would rather be beside my point.

In my early years I yearned for clarity and believed there might be an answer to every question, if one kept on asking long enough. Thus I read and read and researched and imagined I found answers in someone else’s words and used quotes to survive the chaos.

I am now aware I have come to see things from a slightly different angle, every answer begs at least five more questions, there are no absolutes, we all hold our opinions close to our hearts and are surprised some else has a completely different point of view, if not careful you could feel insulted and even grab a weapon to prove your point.

Within life there is death – one could say the greatest conundrum of all – there is no end, except The End, or should I say My End, as of course Life moves on, irrespective of who or what.

The reason I got to thinking along these lines, is the growing awareness within self of a subtle change in my attitude towards my work, i.e. everything I make. I never strove for perfection (a whole new issue which I am not even going to enter here) but I did like clarity, which can be many things, but that is not what I’m on about here; what I imagined I was making was an object in which my thoughts/feelings etc were clear and apparent to the viewer, notwithstanding their own viewpoint.

These days I am more and more surprised, not so much by what happens in the process as that has always intrigued me, but by the fact I now embrace ambiguity, am fascinated by the not-knowing what it is that has happened. How the resulting image still holds many secrets, how I am now able to stop ‘improving’, how I increasingly trust the handiwork to reveal what needs to be revealed, even though I don’t understand it myself.

Part of this story is illustrated by yesterday’s water colour doodles, only later did the words arrive.