A MISSED CALLING

 
When it comes to art, you'd think my favorite part would be the making of it, right? The painting or the drawing or the tearing or the gluing. But for me, it's none of the above. It's the admiring. I finally figured this out recently when I was starting a new project in my travel journal.

I work on one color at a time, tearing up bits of my hand-painted papers, then gluing them onto the rough painting I have done in the journal, as if they were bits of mosaic. To be perfectly honest, as much as I love the results, the gluing gets kinda tedious after awhile, so I can only do it in short spurts.

But, what I really, really love are those points in the process where I'm switching to a new color, and I pull out everything I have in that hue and fan them out around me.

Then I just sit there. Admiring them.

The same was true when I was a seamstress and then a quilter, and spent more time collecting fabrics and arranging them by color than I actually did sewing.

Or when I learned to knit and started collecting yarn.

Or when I took up gardening and spent most of my time wandering the aisles of garden centers, adding and subtracting plants from my cart until I had a color blend that made me smile.

It kicked in BIG time when I discovered on-ling art workshops, and began collecting art supplies. Is there anything more fun than buying new paints, inks, or crayons, then reworking your shelves to make room, and sitting back to admire the results? Or is it just me?

Alas, I fear I am no artist. I am actually a color-collector!

Not long ago I stumbled across this little video about the Forbes Pigment Collection, housed in the Harvard Art Museum. Then I realized it was some lucky someone's job to organize and display those 2500 pigment samples.

Talk about a missed calling!