The Artist at Work

I admire artists.  I admire people who can draw, and sculpt, and carve.  Those are what most people think of when they think of artists.

But those aren't the only artists.  Those are the artists that probably get the most recognition for being artists.  What I admire, though, are the everyday artists.

I admire people who can conceive of something that doesn't yet exist in this world, and then throw their whole being into creating it.  I have been privileged to know a few artists like that in my lifetime.

I spent the earlier part of my week helping a friend put in a wood floor in a house he is renovating.  I enjoyed learning how to do something I had known how to do before.  My friend had done floors for a living prior to having his back broken in an accident, and while he couldn't work as hard or as long as he had in the past, he was very capable of showing me a few tricks.

And he was capable of creating art.

He conceived of designs and and imagined how they would look.  He either had the necessary skills to make the designs happen, or improvised on the spot how to make the images in his mind come to life.  I'm sure he was in a lot of pain while doing it.  It would have been much easier to just lay the floor in simple straight lines.  If he had done that, I could have completed it myself in a day and a half after he showed me the ropes.

Instead, he took the time to make the hundreds of extra, meticulous cuts.  Some boards had to be cut five and six times in order to fit just right.  Instead of me doing it by myself in two days, it took three people three days to finish.  And it was beautiful.

He kept saying over and over how beautiful it would be when finished.  I thought it would be nice, but I had no idea how beautiful it could be.  Turns out, it was stunning.  He took a great amount of joy in his creation.  I was glad to be there to see the process, to see the joy in the act of creating a thing of beauty push him past the pain.