An Advent of Sense

I wish I could boil it all down to a few core ideas that I’d like to run with in my art-making, or a raison d’etre that winds through all my creative activities. Sure, themes show up, things that I am particularly intrigued by and have to process through creative means. But boiling it down is tough—I spend my days dancing with and dodging ideas that throw themselves at me like I’m some sort of artistic Tiger Beat heartthrob. They’ll be new ideas, ideas about previous ideas, or developments on a slight idea detour I took about last week’s thrilling idea. This isn’t to say that I don’t get things done; somehow, I manage to sift through the slurry of ideas and extract the ones that feel especially exciting and plausible, and I make them happen. Even then, I’m a generous extractor and still end up with heaps of ideas piled on my plate. It’s sort of like my ideas are fresh dough (gluten free—I have an allergy) and I’m running them through a hand-cranked pasta-making machine (I absolutely l