Some time last month the eminent Slam Poet Bernard “The Klute” Schober reached out to me via text, inviting me to collaborate with him yet again. He’d written a new poem based on a maritime incident that to this day is enshrouded in mystery. Would I care to try an illustration?

So I read the poem, and pondered it, and read it to my ex-wife Joni and daughter Kate, and got input from them, and pondered some more, and then tried my hand at “concept rough” sketching. And I bombed. My sketching captured NONE of the essence of the poem, and was lackluster and confusing to boot. More sketching didn’t help.

Then I got the lightbulb. SKETCHING was the wrong approach to this visceral, gutslamming piece. Try SCULPTING. See what happens.

What happened is what you see. It is not the final version of the image, which will involve apparatus and Morse Code, but it is the essence. Today I’ll do more ceramic sculpting, not with the trepidation that went with the sketching, but with the confidence and “high”ness of someone who has found the right track.

The moral of this creative-process story is “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, but try a different approach.”

Please stay tuned!