As the story goes, someone made a rude comment about the appearance of this red-haired daughter to her two brunette parents.
"She was born a week late," Flicka recalled hearing her mother explain. "It's from rust."
I really have a bias against people with red hair. I find them consistently to be very troublesome for me. Red-headed accountant-types always have this secret fantasy that they are creatives and work the edges to make it reality.
Red-headed sirens are always looking for a curvey brunette and a leggy blonde to join them in their escapades. I use the rather generalized "always" because in each time I've ever come across a CPA/CFO or siren of the red-headed persuasion without exception it has been the case. Also without exception is that their hopes and dreams have had a significant impact on my reality.
Some have a talent, it is a given, but most juxpose two opposites together with limited success. I completely understand the limits of my abilities. I have no illusions of being everything to everyone.
I am an artist, not a craftman. Craftmen are into the details, the theory behind the effort, they truly understand and embrace the building blocks of their craft and achieve a perfection I will never obtain.
I don't have the attention span to be a craftsman. Could accuse me of being lazy, but that is really not the problem. Such matters are just not important to me, and no matter how hard I try to focus and make them important - it is knowledge that my brain does not retain.
Instead my thoughts process how the "message" can be cross-applied to other mediums, re-interpreted in other ways, expressed through a completely different direction...thus making the details of the current craft immaterial.
Which is why I totally love and appreciate the craftmen who team up with me. The tireless and dedicated folks who prep before I paint a mural and clean up afterwards. They make the lines straight, keep the paint just on the surfaces it is supposed to touch, make the finished product neat and professional.
My editors I hold with the same high regard. They tease me about my colloquial (my word, not theirs) grammar, spelling, and word choices. I smile when I see them frustrated that I have either used an uncommon word from antiquity or just made up a new one that sounded appropriate. There is a bit of eye-rolling when they have to constantly fix choice of words that sound the same that are spelled differently that I graciously put up with.
Leonardo da Vinci had a team of craftsmen to pick up the pieces he had no interest in so he could focus his efforts on those that caught his fancy. I'm just following the model of a productive genius.
I note da Vinci often drew in red chalk, including a self portrait. In such a medium everyone would be a red-head. What a dangerous world he was considering with that.
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