My Ode to O'Keefe

This project has had me at odds with myself, it feels like yin and yang the way it's been pulling me in opposite directions. I felt as if I had managed to sabotage my original concept the moment I began working on it, but now I wonder if I accomplished my intent supremely in the beginning, and am now only working my way away from it...

The idea was to re-create the image in pieces, of impressions of color, shape, light and shadow and not in defined parts of leaf and petal. I had wanted to do it in stitchery with perhaps some beading, but couldn't surrender myself to trust in stitchery alone and so began by painting the panels to help my stitchery along. I used only two colors, red and green, along with white for highlighting, and worked section by section, not the image as a whole. It was at this point that I felt that I had sabotaged my intent, because I had painted a picture of a poppy, when I had only meant to provide some background for my stitches. So, at first I was dismayed, until it occurred to me that I accomplished with the painting what I had intended to accomplish with the stitching. Written out like this it seems absurd, but I really did surprise myself!

I have to declare this project a success, if only for all the thoughts and ideas it's provoked in me about how I wish I would have done it! If I had world enough and time, I would tackle this idea in several different ways...as it is, I am giving myself permission to deviate from my original intent with this project, and see where it leads me. I can feel that disciplining myself to keep to my original idea at this point is only paralyzing me, and will end up forcing me to abandon it altogether. And as far as the original concept goes, it has already demonstrated the foregone conclusion...that the pieces of life our brains assemble, an incomplete knowledge of people, places and things, enriched with bits supplied by imagination, although in truth is an imperfect assemblage, for all practical purposes it can still be a close enough approximation to what is "real"... I amuse myself to recognize that a truth so fundamental to living a human existence (because as humans, possessing a perfect and complete knowledge of anything, even ourselves, is impossible) should be so surprising to me when applied to art...