Thursday, April 17, 2014

Mozaik and the fun of the creating process

I have always felt the need to be creative. When I was a small kid I naturally could not buy the materials I desired, and had to be creative in the true sense of the word. One of my all time high creative adventures is probably when I was around 11 years old and saw in a book a picture of a glass painting. I remember that it was a flower, but no other details. I lacked several of the needed tools, for one glass and the other glass paint. I did however owned a stash of puffy textile paint (which I never dared to use because of my lack of drawing skills) and like most families we owned clingy plastic and cardboard boxes. I simply made a cardboard frame with a cut out window, glued/stick the clingy wrap to it. I put the whole thing on glass picture example and copied the lines with textile puffy paint. It turned out great and my mother put it on the mantle piece. That evening a guest came by and was curiously toughed the paint (which had not dried yet) and smudged the whole thing. My mother was afraid that I would be upset and almost did not dare to tell me. I was not upset, I liked the journey of creating it, not so much the finished object. Although I liked the "painting" I did not redo it.


I usually have a urge to try something new and the finished project sometimes even becomes a burden. A few weeks ago my sister and I went to a mosaic workshop (the workshop part was massively overstated). I did not have a clear project in mind about what I was going to make but I did decide beforehand a fruit bowl. I very much liked the process and was not dissatisfied with the result (the picture was made directly after filling the whole with cement and therefore the whole thing is still a bit white) but the bowl did end up in the trash yesterday. The whole thing was simply not that practical and did take up a lot of space on our dining table. I could have stored it somewhere, but I knew from experience that it would had to go somewhere in the future. Somehow throwing away a finished project is much easier than throwing out a failed partly finished project. When throwing away a failed not yet finished project I am reminded of the failure and feel like failure, throwing away a finished project just provides space to try something new. Is that just me?