Recently, during several conversations
I’ve had,
I have refined a personal understanding.
The questions arise…
- Why, since my fiber medium is considered female and
work by females in our society is still regularly, even
automatically discounted…
- Why, since my fiber work is very labor intensive and
therefore the time spent creating it is still not in
balance with an hourly wage salable price…
- Why, since it is essentially impossible to completely
transcend the *artists never succeed till they die* syndrome
because our culture is still holding this perceived pattern
so completely…
- Why, since I’ve discovered that as a not/heterosexual
male in a group that is 98% female, I have little in
common with most of the rest of my group…
- Why, since art by its very nature is often entirely
disregarded by our culture…
- Why do I continue to persevere?
While it always has been, I have recently more fully self-recognized
my Art Path as my Spiritual Practice.
- Listening to music most of the time…
- Designing, both the sketching and envisioning parts…
- Drawing and constructing the cardboard patterns…
- Pulling together the myriad, often unrelated textiles…
Cutting out the always more than I need group of fabrics,
or my dismemberment process…
- Laying out the mass of print and pattern and color
until it gels, thereby ordering chaos…
- Machine constructing, or re-membering the various
component parts…
- Setting up to quilt the never before existing, yet
re-born single pieced surface…
- Hand quilting, always in a very high state of meditation…
- And then finishing and signing the new work, freeing
it from me in a completion exercise…
- Is my Spiritual Practice. It is my Religion. It is
my God.
I self-recognized that following my childhood interests
would be following my right destiny.
I self-recognized that working in my fiber medium would
balance my masculine and feminine energies, allowing a
state of wholeness to manifest.
I self-recognized that in giving it all up to my Art, I
surrendered to the Creative Spirit of the Universe.
And who wouldn’t want to know they’d achieved
that Connection/Immersion/Union? In doing so I self-recognized the Oneness of all things.
Including me.
The final question becomes…
Why would I ever want to stop?
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