Don Stewart —
Sometimes all it takes is the right suggestion, by the right person, at the right time.
I was in the middle of my fourth or fifth animal face, maybe it was the sixth, enough faces anyway to call the collection an unintentional series. That’s how it is sometimes, when a random idea (a moose made of chocolate, for example) blossoms into a new picture, a picture good enough to generate another idea (say, a black bear made of blackberries), and that in turn another, to the end that I was beginning to enjoy a certain level of confidence that given the proper allowance of time and curiosity, I might transform any familiar animal into a delightful display of visual punmanship.
Six months into the lockdown, I had already finished two new animal faces, completed the design of a third, and was already on to another. This one will be a breeze, my right brain assured me. You’re on a roll!
Well, that part was true. I was on a roll. Months of Covid-19 quarantine gave me (and my wife, and every other artist who had the means at hand to feed themselves) the greatest gift ever: weeks and weeks of enforced isolation, time unencumbered by expectations of accomplishing anything other than following every creative impulse wherever it happened to lead. I had drawn a wolf’s head made of knitting, a fox out of chickens, a retriever of laboratory glassware. Now I was inspired to render the face of a raccoon, out of…something.
I’ll grant that this sounds a bit strange, beginning an art project without knowing where to start, or which direction to go, but that’s often how my creative process works. It makes more sense perhaps to start with a guiding concept, an idea or at least a catchphrase to point the way: Wolf in sheep’s clothing. Fox in the henhouse. Chocolate moose.
That the raccoon lacked a suitable proverb to get me started along a particularly generative visual/verbal path wasn’t a problem. I often start with a feeling, a near certainty that a germ of an idea is enough to push an entire project through to completion. I would do a little reading to add to my understanding of these clever, feisty critters, gather a few photos for anatomical study, and something useful would pop to mind. It nearly always did… eventually.
Take ‘Trash Panda’, for instance. This comic moniker, a combination of the animals’ masked countenance and its nocturnal dietary forays, is vernacular enough to be the name of a minor league baseball team. So, a bandit made of trash…
“Whatcha working on?” the Missus asked, after I had been wrestling in the refuse, grappling with garbage for a day or two, and losing. “A raccoon? You should make it out of masks,” she said. “It’s already wearing one.”
Ten facemasks and a bandanna later, our friendly little trash panda is ready to go scurrying off into the night to protect us from all sorts of random varmints… er, variants.
© 2022 Don Stewart
The Creative Process
