The Wayward Artist
is a term I use in the book I am now writing on-line, called Hair on the Shower Wall and other creative opportunities. Take a look!
It's about the creative process and common natural materials.
It's about "ordinary creativity", that energy we all have and use to make our lives everyday.
It's the result of working rustic for almost 30 years and teaching about it for 25 years. The Wayward Artist is the artist-in-residence in us all. S/he must and does make. S/he makes things, dinner, his way, appointments, deals and trouble, just to name a few.
It's taken me years to figure some of this out.
Every so often, tucked in between sets of chairs, beds and tables, I'd find myself making something "else". Something that wasn't really a chair or a table. After years of "elses", I began to see certain patterns and themes in these objects.
Wayward Ways:
“wayward” Middle English, short for awayward, turned away, from away,
1. following one's own capricious, wanton, or depraved inclinations : UNGOVERNABLE
"a wayward child"
2. following no clear principle or law UNPREDICTABLE
3. opposite to what is desired or expected UNTOWARD " wayward fate"
Synonym: positively, pleasantly contrary
Hair on the Shower Wall is an exploration of the needs, costs and benefits of tendencies we all have towards expressing the ungovernable, the untoward and the contrary parts of ourselves. But it is not just about the maker. It's an attitude towards the making of objects... Or perhaps, it's learning that objects get themselves made through us. Objects "matter" themselves into existence through humans.
an example of mattering
For the last five years, pieces of bark from 
the Hudson River have been mattering their ways through me and my studio. I forage for them, carve them and arrange them. There are now hundreds...WHY?
What I seem to now about them is that they have something to say about the many aspects of our s'elves: some preferred, some hidden away, all with influence. At the moment, Anima, is the word associated with them.
Hair on the Shower Wall is about the workings of imagination and creativity and about making things. It's about the "'how" of making, but it's really more about the why and what of making. It's about ways of seeing, ways of being and ways of doing and the changing mix of all three. This means that there is no first way, best way or one way. We are an ever-changing mix of tendencies and influences. Some people use the word archetype.
Since May, 2009, I am writing this material on-line. I did not create or invent any of the ideas I'm collecting and writing about... I am just another elocution of these realities.
Samples from Hair on the Shower Wall
FACE-to-FACE encounters
August, 2009 in Warwick, NY
Since 2000, many of us with Wayward interests meet each year at one of the two Woodlander Gatherings. This year will be our 17th and 18th Gatherings.
Monthly in Stone Ridge, NY
I am scheduling short workshops.
Block Island
my backyard