Something Beautiful

Okay, this one is going to be very stream of conscience because it is late and I am barely.

Just had a lovely visit with an old friend over tea and chatter, catching up, and swept away by how lovely a woman she is, and in a quick browse over the web once she had left, a faint feeling that something was awaiting, a sense of immanence. Brush over etsy and there in the recent listings I find... this card. A digital overlay imagery of butterfly and tiger eyes, subtle and haunting... such exquisite beauty.

Actually while that piece alone was nice, not really riveting, it sent me on a trip down the weblines to a site of two brilliant artists. I'm wandering around it, seeing so many things of invention and alchemy and sheer aesthetic glory... it was one of those satori moments as I looked over every piece of art and jewelly - a virtual window shop into a fantastic Oriental little market stall of wonders. I see pieces that JB would love, or Arkay, or Kimiko... even my kids, my mother. And yet... not quite anything that is just for me.

I am awed by the creativity and intuitiveness that artists like these can pull up out of dormant materials, out of inorganics such vibrant living colour and form. Awed, and I admit it, deeply envious.

The thing is, after a browse over literally every picece they had to offer I am both frustrated and inspired. Inspired by the creativity, the purity and the invention of the images and jewelry,. frustrated by my own fragmented talents and means to make the things I see in their work, and the awareness that no matter how good I could become as an artist of any media, my work will always leave me cold while these artists sing to me. Frustrated also knowing I would love to own a piece made by such hands, but I'd wish for something custom to me, that didn't just resonate vaguely but rang me like a bell, strummed me like a harp string chord. They are already so close... if they could just see into me, they could play an entire orchestral etude in beaded, silver, coper, glass and paint... I would never look away from that piece. It would make of me Narcissus.

And yet... stung by images as beautiful as my dreams, I *want* so badly. I am sore with the twisting bittersweetness of it.

So synchronous that I feel I had been primed for the moment, like a canvas, a pump or a gun. A surface prepared, and the finding of those artists can't be the whole of it. Immanence remains, a dull throb behind the ache of desire to build, make, paint, create.

And I am left holding thread and hook and a limited craft and even more limited talent. It is the ambition that is limitless.

I wonder if the ostrich ever dreams in memory of flight.