There is such a feeling of triumph when I finish a long project. I started the Elephant smalls in early July and they have been a constant companion in the work box all this time. They have been on road trips - ridden in cars, trucks and airplanes, crossed a continent to a foreign country and back. They've been looked at by hundreds of people as I sat working on them at shows. They've been the vehicle to start more than a few conversations with an unexpected variety of people who admired them or remembered their grandmothers' handwork. Those elephants have been a sort of member of my internal family and have spun off their own share of secondary inspriations large and small. Hopefully, they will be the foundation of a growing new enterprise as they have already led to offers and suggestions for the future. Two days ago, I took the final stitch - did the last finishing work - did the photographs. I'll be putting the patterns and pictures together to make the pattern set in the next couple of days. I should be thrilled - jubilant. But there's a sort of post-partem melancholy - a sense of loss that what has occupied the center of my artistic universe for all this time is now done and passing into yesterday. Tomorrow has yet to take its place and fill the void. Its an odd feeling - this time of transition between one artistic obsession and another.
Well, soon the details will all be wrapped up - the patterns packaged - the objects will integrate themselves into my work basket at need or be carefully wrapped and stored in a box. I knew this would happen - it always does. Major projects have a way of generating their own center of gravity so that all the rest of the artistic endeavors orbit around them. Even when I'm not actively working on them, they are playing somewhere in the back of my mind, keeping their own share of my attention. When I'm done, its like having music that was playing constantly in the background suddenly stop. Now I'm waiting for the next song to begin. So while I was working on Elephants I was also designing other things. Today or tomorrow at the latest the new series will begin - the patterns are all waiting in a notebook; the colors have already been laid out and organized, And that too will be lovely ....
But I really REALLY enjoyed those elephants :-)
