My customer wants a picture for an article. It must be clear without falling into the banal; i don’t find it. This article talks about children in a context of divorce, and i’m collecting sad and crying children, in the full or in the dim light, sitting alone or pulled by parents… The sheet and the thought fill up with images elbowing for a place, without leading me beyond. My creations become a little crowd besieging me with bother. I find myself caught between an inspiration need and the impossible gesture of stretching out my hand for seizing it. The more I try, the more it escapes me.
Talking about his animals, Konrad Lorenz pointed out that game occurs when there is no danger and the belly is full: when there are not important and urgent issues to face. But the appointment with my buyer is exactly this, and it seems to prevent the favorable circumstances for the creative game that itself requires.
Clearly, working doggedly on the aim does not favour the birth of the image, but neither i can stay with folded arms while a stupid clock is scoffing at me. What work can i carry on with to get closer to the inspiration, downwind, without making it escaping? The right image seems to come when it feels like coming only, but there must be in the back-stage of the mind a suitable situation for its birth. There must be somewhere between the conscious and the inconscious an idea of the structure that i have to illustrate, capable to supply raw materials for starting the neural magic off towards the G point of creativeness.
And so, i stop drawing children and i start writing where they came from and where they will go, forgetting their appearance. I let fading away all the images i collected before, because they absorbed the effort sweat they had been conceived with, and the smell was not good. I interview the subject of my paintings and i tell in words his past and his future, jumping from one thing to another or deepening in the never ending details, inventing something completely or mixing my experiences with my fancies. In this way i can give vent to my stress with a work bringing me closer to the result. The stories causal nexuses sediment in some hidden place of the thought, populating it with seeds i await a bud from, in occasion of which i will come back from the words world to the images one.
When i insisted on searching inspiration in the images field, the badly functioning creations[1] asked me to trace the breakdown and to make them worthwhile. So every figure that was not the right one weighed me down ending up by being a damage. Now that I moved into the words field everything i build is nothing and does not weigh me down, slips away without regrets because it’s not what I’m looking for.[2]
But really this words flow is not a nothing only, it’s the care too for something still i don’t see; as there is a rain dance, there is a dance for the images, and words are drops to forget and find them again.
