The 'Queensland Lovespoon' is now finished and it's time to try and complete the 'Birds Lovespoon' that I had begun earlier. This is the first project that I have completed for quite a while as the book illustration work and a number of other weekly commitments have the priority. I am also hoping to re-commence the botanical art course that I started with last year and I will also need to complete one pyrography work in May.
My plans are then to carve a number of simpler lovespoons, perhaps focusing more on the timber. However I think that for the most part I will still tend more toward the complex and intricate designs partly because I always begin with a drawing to which it is so easy to add.
I am still finding the ball in cage motif a bit difficult, more difficult than it should be at this stage. A re-thinking of the process that I use might be in order, something approaching a logical series of safe ordered steps, rather than the reliance upon intuitive solutions, grasped in an opportunistic rampage through the mass of the material.
I like to work this way however, at least in part, but it is a brittle and edgy way of working that needs to be tempered with some sound logical method and planning. This way of working also leads to additions and the covering of tracks along the way so simplicity is going to be a challenge that will rely on stricter planning.
Trying and seeing what happens is better than procrastination however. This investigative and experimental 'trying', when coupled with a stern and stubborn determination to clamber up a path paved with all your failed attempts, is probably what that thing is, that people call 'talent' in any particular field.
If that's what talent is, everyone has it and it's best not to try and quantify it. You can pass on by your own little successes in your field, along the way, all the time energised by better enjoying other people's successes, as observed from the vantage point of being on a similar but unique path.
