Artists are people who feel compelled to take note of the everyday ephemera others gloss over. We take these moments in for one simple reason—beauty tends to dwell inside them.
 
I cut a piece of wood in my shop. While I start off concentrating on the piece of wood I was intending to create, I’m amazed how often the real reverie comes in noticing what’s going on with the resulting scrap wood. Often these cutoffs become my inspiration for new work.
 
The challenge is always the same: let go, if only for a moment, your original purpose, so the scraps can inform where the work might go. Actively working with materials others discard is another route to similar aesthetic inspiration.

Regardless of where I find my source material, the desire is the same: to participate in a larger, more fundamental process of creation, in which the destruction of an old order is required to create the possibility of something new. 

                                                                                  ak