Preconceptions, Life, & Art
I’ve been thinking a lot about preconceptions lately and how they show up in life. No one anyone sets out to create a preconception but they are created and used on a regular basis. The thing with it is that we see only that one potential and when it doesn’t happen the way we preconceived it would happen, it disappoints.
What started me thing about this topic is a warm up exercise I did for Life Book. I had this idea of what it was going to look like when done. My preconception of what my art project was going to look like hampered my enjoyment of the finished work. You see it didn’t look like it was supposed to. I’m not even really sure that I knew what it was supposed to look like. All I knew was that it was not my preconceived notion what it was going to end up being.
We do this all the time in life. Something wonderful comes and we reject it because it was not how we pictured it. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, maybe it was what we wanted, maybe it wasn’t anything at all. But putting up a barrier so you can’t even see it starts to be an issue. It also occurred to me that life is a lot like the creative process.
You plan it out, get it plotted, pick out colors and how you want it to be. Next thing you know you scrapped the color scheme and completely changed the lay out. Why? Because that is what worked. Art like life can’t be forced to fit the shape you think it should be. This doesn’t mean don’t plan, don’t dream. It just encourages us to see something else that might not look like what we want but is better and even more what we want.
It took an outside opinion to get me to see my warm up as something lovely. Someone commented on how pretty and soft the colors are. So I tried to see it with new eyes. Yes the colors are soft and lovely. I kept looking at it over a period of several days and realized, that I did like it. But those pesky preconceived notions got in my way.
Don’t push something way because it is not what you think it should be. Keep the door open and maybe just maybe you might find something even better or enjoyment in what you already have that was not what you wanted.
