Original vision

It has been my experience that all the data you need for a complete work of art is usually contained in the original vision. Original means "that which came first", and by original vision I simply mean what you saw in the instant you first conceived of the work.

When one has worked for some time on a work, one can easily get tangled up into the artistic or technical complexities that has turned up since one got started, and so one can lose track of where one is going. Get confused and not seem to know how to go on from there.

I find it helpful to close my eyes and mentally "flash back" to the very first impression I had of the idea I have for the work at hand. It seems that far from being a mere sketch, this idea or vision actually, when looked at closely, contains all the information there is about the details there should be in the final work. I might not have been able to see it all in the beginning, but that is merely a result of lack of sufficient attention span, I think.

Perhaps the act of Creation is truly without time. Perhaps it is all really created outside the time stream, or just in such a minute span of time that we hardly measure it in the "real" universe.

However that may be, I find that when I look at the original idea I had, instead of all the considerations I have made since, I can see what still needs to go into the work, what needs to be changed, and what need not go there at all.

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