We all know the situation. The “phone rings, and you look at the screen. It is not a number you recognise or appears among your list of contacts. Is it really a message for you, or is it some scam? It could even possibly be simple, old-fashioned wrong number. What, if anything, should be my response?
This is a highly apt metaphor for my situation at the moment with respect to art. This afternoon I made another attempt to get to grips with mono-printing in order to develop a particular idea I have in mind. Once again, I could not obtain the effect I wanted, although I have to admit that I was closer to it than on previous occasions. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Should I recognise that this is actually never going to work as I imagine it? Or is it the case that the message I ought to be receiving is to keep trying, and a gradual learning process will eventually deliver the effect for which I’m looking? Is this a message at all?
I think that I did receive a message of a very different kind while sitting in the garden enjoying a cup of tea this afternoon. I noticed yesterday that two of our rose-bushes have become hosts to colonies of greenfly. As I sat out there this afternoon I spotted the activity of tiny blue-tits on these same bushes. It seems that they go nuts for green-fly. I am sure that quite a number of gardeners, confronted with an infestation of green-fly, would reach as a reflex for the insecticide spray. If I had done so I would not have been enjoying the blue-tits. I get the message!