Stop Looking at Me!

While I might not work on my digital collage (that I just blogged about) everyday, I do happen to see it everyday. I’d guesstimate that I’m at my computer for about 15 hours everyday. Right now, my digital collage is opened on my desktop, quietly staring at me and waiting to be manipulated, while other windows like Firefox, Word, and Dreamweaver are scattered on my screen.

So, I see my digital collage all the time, and I sometimes wonder if I get bored of it. I stopped working on this collage sometime in June and haven’t touched it since the other week, and I think that pause was brought on because of how often I would stare at the same image and just get bored.

I was curious to know if anyone out there had some personal advice about seeing your work-in-progress all the time. Cover it? Hide it? Burn it? Deal with it? I swear my collage is laughing at me right now.

I’m known to be a fast creator.  I’m very impatient.  But now I’m beginning to work over an extended period of time and I’m not used to it at all.  It’s strange for me to see my work being created so ’slowly’.  I’m totally enjoying this perfectly normal method of working, but it is freaking me out to see my work change so slowly.

I could relate this idea to artists who have studios and work with physical material like paint or charcoal. You see the same image, hanging on your wall or propped on an easel everyday. Slowly but surely it starts to develop, but those few times when you take a pause the image stays the same. Does seeing the image, unchanged, bore you? Or what about a section of a painting or drawing you know is complete, so you move on to another section—how do you deal with seeing that completed section everyday until the rest of the piece is complete?

Another example I could give would be my actor friends with their ‘jams’. My musical theatre friends all have their standard audition songs that they’ve been singing for years. I wonder how a singer deals with the repetition of singing the same song over and over and over? Or an actor with a monologue—what do you do to refresh yourself every time you’re about to present the words?