When you can't BS your way through it, try coming up with a real idea!

Silence is only golden when it’s wanted. If I’m intending or needing to produce words and images, I am none too pleased if they refuse to come to me. You know how irritated I get with my uncooperative vocal cords when I’d like to have a nice ordinary conversation without struggle. Sometimes I’m far worse, though, about being reasonable and patient when it’s the written word that refuses to come out of the starting blocks. Neurological recalcitrance I can blame on some biological bad fairy, but it feels much  more like a personal failure when it’s intellectual drag that keeps me from the productivity I desire. Brain, get up and go!

Drawing combines the two potential frustrators in a perfectly imperfect storm of madness: both brain and body are refusing to cooperate in my scheme to produce. Internal hissy fits ensue. I know enough not to dissolve in a pool of weepy self-pity since it solves nothing and tends merely to make one look more than a little ridiculous and immature, and yea verily, I need no advancement in that department. Getting mad is equally unproductive. Nothing’s fixed. The only cure is to plod forward, idea-less, until a useful thing deigns to appear in my cranium or at my fingertips again.

Last week’s drawing session was a good time to revisit the simplest of basics at all levels as a starting point in my latest campaign for artistic growth. But I’m thinking this week that what I also crave is improvement of my imaginative muscles so that when I flex them in exercise I needn’t always fall back on the expected standard fare to get something to appear. If I must, I will resort to baloney or bluffing to get me through, but is it not very much more amusing, and even fulfilling, to be able to think up something I’ve never thunk before?

My way of getting that muscle at least poised to flex is to tell myself it’s time to make a picture of something no one’s seen before. Me, especially. The easiest way to do that is to invent new objects, scenes and creatures. Often it’s enough to make my own version of recombinant DNA or mutations or contraptions out of almost real parts assembled strangely and unexpectedly. The animals must be unlike any I’ve seen in real life or on film or in a zoological tome; more than that, they should be visibly ill-conceived enough that they would instantly become extinct, if real, for clearly failing to meet any evolutionary standard. The machines should be contraptions with no obvious possible use; more than that, they should appear to be made to produce ill-designed crud and, probably, life-threatening injuries upon anyone foolish enough to attempt operating them.

At least on paper, the only serious threat any of them poses is to my dignity or, at worst, to the sensitive good taste of hapless viewers seeing them without warning. If any one of you has received a poke in the eye today by visiting my blog, my apologies. Though I’m not really very good at being penitent, odd bird that I am.

I leave you with the Edmontonian Contraption, designed during a Pro Coro rehearsal sometime last spring. Fortunately, the choir sang ever so much better than this item will ever run.

At least it could probably make a good sound if used as a sort of aeolian instrument . . . maybe . . .