I typically write in the morning. My head is clear, my energy is peaking, and the day is full of possibilities that excite me. Words come easily and they flow in a certain way. But the idea to write this blog came to me at 3:55pm one breezy afternoon, a time during which I almost never get the urge to write. I get sluggish in the afternoon. My mind is usually exhausted and I mostly choose tasks that need very little creativity: packing orders, coating new paintings, making prints, loading the van. I am a great afternoon grunt but not a great afternoon creative. But today, the gentle wind blew in a beginning into how I could start spelling the end.
Ideas are spirits. They come to you like the salty air as you stand on a bluff overlooking the vast ocean. They visit you when you least expect it, in quiet, slightly drowsy moments while staring at the windshield on a long road trip or those weird dreamlike scenes as your juuuuuust drifting off to sleep. On a walk in the woods, on a long bike ride along a desolate road, on a log, sitting quietly by the campfire while everyone else but you and the owls and the scavengers are sleeping. These are the moments when ideas sneak up on you form the dark ether of the spirit realm.
Ideas are living beings with real desires. Behold! They exist! But like their human vehicles, existence is not enough. They float through space and time waiting to be detected, waiting to be realized, looking for the ideal mind in which to burrow. And burrow they do, demanding your attention like a throbbing tooth, painful to acknowledge but impossible to ignore.
As creatives, it is not our job to simply seek out ideas but rather, it is our job to simply be ready for them when they come knocking. Let ideas find you at your desk with your page blank and your pencil sharpened. Let them find you at your keyboard with your scales practiced. Let them find you up before everyone else with your ballet shoes laced tight. When they do manage to announce their arrival in your mind, you must drop everything and capture them! Make a sketch, write a line, take notes, for ideas are elusive and slippery and selfish. If you don’t them their proper attention, they will leave in search of worthy host.
Some creatives have learned to have great command over ideas. Tom Waits used to curse at ideas that came to him while he was gridlocked in LA traffic. He would yell at them and demand that they find him at a better time, perhaps when he was at his battered piano in the studio.
Poet Ruth Stone famously described being physically chase by ideas while working in the fields. She would feel the earth beneath her shudder and hear the thunderous approach of a coming idea. Then she would sprint like hell to her writing desk to hastily jot down the poem before it thundered right through her, leaving her in its calamitous wake, void of words.
The idea for The Jobs of Yesteryear cam to me like a whisper in the wind, a tiny piece of thread clowing into my studio window in Boulder, Colorado. I grasped it, pulled on it gently and with Ashley’s guidance and encouragement, followed its course. We’ve realized over the course of the past ten years that this dainty little thread of an idea was connected to a massive coil of rope that would pull us and our yet to be born children all over the world. We would make a living, we would make babies, we would make murals and sculptures and the wellspring of ideas would be ever abundant.
The Jobs of Yesteryear Series has been my identity as an artist. It has been my calling card and my one-line description of what I do. This idea has connected us to thousancs of people and hundreds of places and allowed us to be our own bosses and run our life and business as we see fit. This idea has been damn good to us and I believe we’ve been good to it.
But this idea’s spirit has left.
Over the course of painting 467 Jobs of Yesteryear paintings (and counting), the soul of this idea has flourished inside of me. I’ve spent ten years getting to know this idea and nurturing its possibilities and feeding it my time and energy in digestible little lumps and sometimes beg heaping gulps. It has consumed me and I gladly give in to its embrace. But now the warmth of the embrace has begun to shift. It hasn’t grown cold, it’s just grown old, as all things tend to do.
The spirit of The Jobs of Yesteryear has moved on.
My goal is to paint 500 Jobs of Yesteryear paintings because that’s such a nice round number and it is relatively achievable. I may get there, I may not, but one thing is certain, this is the year that I will set set aside The Jobs of Yesteryear.
Now that the spirit of one gigantic and life-changing idea has begun to move on from my creative center, I will sit still with my antennae up, my eyes and heart open, and my paintbrush ready, awaiting the next signal from beyond that it is time, YES it is time, to create something new.