A new life

Apr 30

In soft pastels, as in so many other aspects in life, sometimes things may not go as planned. Lots of things can go wrong… Maybe the texture, maybe the thikness is not enough, or the pigment had problems….Or maybe I forgot to add that ingredient in the formula (?), while thinking on other mundane things… Method is so important! Concentration too. And even focussing hundred percent you can have surprises.

And the result of a little mistake, can be a big deception!

The secret in life is probably to turn out our those mistakes or errors into something positive. I have learn that there is not such thing as failure, but experience. Instead, those situations are an oportunity to change, adapt and progress. And maybe the most important of all, to learn!

I recovered lately a lot of those “errors”. Bad sticks that I had to crash without mercy. They were actually pastel bars not good enough to my personal quality standarts. So I took all of them, and returned them to their original state. Dust. Sometimes you have to destroy to create somthing new. As Mikhail Bakunin say once, “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” And I take its word!

I mixed some very clear yellows with some other pink failures and I started to play. We should never forget to play as when we where children! The discovery, the surprise… Nobody knows better than artists and children that creation and destruction are soul mates. A process.

Carrying out any task requires learning, and it is probably from mistakes that you learn the most. One of the pillars for not getting discouraged is simply to keep moving forward and adapt to situations, no matter how negative they may seem. We always find a result at the end…

Mixing the ingredients is kind of a meditation. I do these movements repeatedly and constantly, like mantras are repeated, entering a dynamic of self-absorption, which takes me away from worries and any problem. It may sound a bit cheesy but I can't find a better definition of being in the "here and now". Until I get the right texture, and the right color.