Just a little water, a little rest, and a straight edge scraper will clean my palette so that I can begin to work anew. Sometimes we wish we could wash ourselves, rest a bit, or scrape off the remains of our day and start over, try again better, so that even if we don’t come up to our hoped for outcomes, at least we will have failed a little closer to our mark.

It’s that stubbornness that gets us up again before our chosen medium to push it, pull it, noodle it, cajole it, or scream at it until we lock ourselves into the rhythmic dance of call and response, fear and dread, passion and exhaustion that we call art. Yet art isn’t just what we make in our studios, for life itself is art. Art is a skill as a result of learning or practice (Latin), whereas the Greek root means complete, just, or suitable. (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=art)

In the case of one person I know, he lives his art and life by skillfully cutting his daughter’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the old cutting board from his boyhood home (http://lettherebedragons.com/husband-and-father/). In the spiritual life, we call this being present in the moment. If we treat each moment of life with intensity, rather than living on autopilot, we will discover our life and art to be more full and more immediate.