The early morning hours hold seemingly limitless potential – for reflection, for creation, for getting the day under control before it’s really started. This morning, for about an hour, I continued a three-crayon improvisation that I had started the day before.
The three crayons (yellow, orange, and blue green) were the ones that happened to be out at my daughter’s coloring station. She had been using ink stamps on the same stretch of paper, but I did not try to incorporate the blue and red blobs from her stamps. I gave myself over, as completely as I could without conscious effort, to the very act of putting lines – straight, wavy, intersecting, of unclear origin, destination, purpose, relationship – on paper, of layering colors and textures and noticing in passing how they mix, change, and morph as they move through the space.
All the while I listened to my thoughts and questions, about the nature of a line, the ways it could start, continue, and end, changing or unvaried, fading in and out (or not), thickening and thinning (or not), twisting and turning (or not). I marveled at all of the myriad choices I was allowing myself, through the physical gestures – sweeping, rhythmic, now incisive, now hesitant – to make, as if the choices were making themselves, and yet controlled by hand and eye, sent forth by my initial purposeful decision to sit down and do this particular purposeless thing.
I heard the music that such an activity possesses, in the subtle sounds of the repetitions and tempo changes, in the melodic contour of rising, falling lines, and especially in the evolution of something like an overarching form – a form neither planned nor fully achieved.
My sketch spoke to me, of possibilities yet to be discovered, of relationships that needed my questions in order to move forward and thrive, of the people I love or serve and how I might love or serve them better. And I thought of all the doing I might do on this still very young day.
| Copyright © 2018 by Geoffrey Dean |
This is beautiful! I relate to your post on many levels. I feel motivated and inspired this morning reading this. I will share it with some friends. Thank you, Geoff.
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