Balancing extremes

Like those weighted blow-up clowns we loved to punch when we were kids, we humans have a way of seeking balance.  When things get extreme, that seeking often manifests as a pendulum swing: I'm particularly aware of that right now, as I'm reading Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus.  It's a historical novel set in Florence at the time of the French invasion, when the heady excesses of the city's Medici era of art and luxury were suddenly lost to the fierce asceticism of the fundamentalist monk, Savonarola.

I seem to be enacting that particular pendulum swing in reverse these days: as the relentless grays of winter begin to wear me down,  I find myself creating increasingly saturated art pieces like this one, a blend of a colorful sunrise and reflections on a blue canoe.  I tried doing something in grays and beiges yesterday and it was a complete disaster; I just couldn't find any way to make it appealing. 

So I reassure myself for that particular failure by thinking that in following my artistic impulses I'm taking responsibility for satisfying my own thirst, finding my own balance, instead of projecting that need outward.  It's a good thing -- and I'll save those gray and beige paints for summer, when I know I'll begin to hunger for those more subtle shades with the same intensity that I crave these now.  Like everything in life, it's seasonal; this, too, shall pass...