The Creative Muse: Image or Idea, which comes first?
There is a sign inside the open lid of one of the rollaway toolboxes in our shop. It reads, “Is this going to be long?” This is a gentle teasing gibe aimed in my direction. I have a tendency to meander into multiple paths when I am telling a story or explaining almost anything. I think this is because, to me, everything is relevant. For example, it was not supposed to snow today, according to the weather forecast at four o’clock this morning. But, the snow still sat on the rhododendron bush behind the porch at two this afternoon. I moved the truck down to the shop at around eight a.m. when it became obvious that if I waited much longer I ran the risk of not being able to move it at all until the snow melted.
When we first moved to this house, from the house on the other side of the highway on the bottom of the hill, it was January. I can’t remember the year but there was a major snowstorm. We moved just my bed and a drawing table, because I couldn’t wait to be up here. The next day the snow came and it was a month before we could move the rest of the furniture. So Dan stayed below in the other house, and I was up here, and it felt as though I was in a ship when the wind blew.
The short version of this story is that the snow on the rhododendrons made me think of a metaphor for evergreen leaves, winter, and the long nights that still lie ahead before spring. Like me under my down coverlet that magic month over a decade ago, the living green leaf still breathes, the cells still perform their internal functions — cell walls provide structure, organelles still create sugars — but it is a suspended state. We can all relate to that. I do not heat my bedroom in the winter, so the warmth of the comforter is a sharp contrast to the air.
Yet that story, stubbornly, is still going in a different direction than I thought it would. My point? I did not know what stories I would tell today, when I snapped that picture. When I stitch my art, I have a general concept and a story to tell, but it emerges as the piece grows, stitch by stitch, color by color, cell by cell.
So is this going to be long? The journey is always exciting. I am looking forward to having people join me in it.
Carol LeBaron
www.followcarollebaron.com
