Cari's Spell

..."Dance The Old Ways" inspired by Cari Ferraro.

Well, it's finished & I'm really pleased.... even more so when I looked again this morning. The light on the 'standing stones' moves as you walk round the room so the lettering feels within the suggested circle, rather than behind or in front of the elements on the page... & the spiral seems to twist through the letters. I can't stop looking at it at the moment... I don't think I've done a piece anything like this before.

I cut a stencil in the shape of the ceramic pieces I'd tried laid on top of it last time, then applied decorators filler through it to form the 3D 'stones'. I had been going to add another layer like carved symbols that were on the ceramic, however I 'just forgot'... and i'm glad I did... methinks the energies of the words were guiding me, as they seem to have done throughout this one! The colour is acrylic, layered on with a sponge in several shades to get the depth & texture of stone.

The spiral is chalk pastel brushed through a stencil, which I cut free-hand... I wanted that randomness in the coils. I initially resisted the use of a spiral even though I'd visualised it there beforehand....strange eh? Purely from a design angle it needed 'something' in that position, but wasn't a spiral too much of a clichee? Or was it cos someone else suggested it too? But really it could have been nothing else.... again the energy guided me!
Now, technically some of the letterforms are a bit 'pinched', and an odd space or two here n there are a bit wayward... and I was very aware of this when I'd completed the writing. In fact I was disappointed with myself at that stage, because this piece was important to me from the start & I wanted it so much to be 'right'.

And you know what? It is 'right'... the whole thing works for me... technically my feet are too wide & some of my curves are a bit wayward... but I'm quite right for me, at this time. I'd be devastated if someone scrunched me up & chucked me in the bin... but that's what so many of us do with unfinished creations when they don't match up to a standard we set for ourselves. By carrying an idea through we can still create something lovely. So what if a letter or stitch or colour or whatever could be better? It's still a valid piece of work if we choose to see it as such. And if we want to do another version we can change or incorporate ideas to create something else without taking anything away from the original piece.

We often look at our work or our selves & see them for what they are not... but only compared to our often unrealistic expectations... that picture in our mind that we aspire to. Now, there's nothing wrong with aspirations, but we can only work with the skills we have at a given time! It may be a fact that we need to work to improve something... but we & our creations are a work in progress, sometimes we just need to look at the overall picture at a given time... at what we have or can do, instead of our limitations or shortcomings.