After Imagination Overflows the Frame, Assemble the Trio: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

You begin the creative process with an image, character, or idea and feed the verdant soil of your imagination with research, musing, notes, images, scenes, metaphors, and daydreaming. You feed it well, the garden grows, and like my late August garden, there is suddenly too much. You try to fit all you’ve come up with into the original frame but the tangle spills through the fence and climbs over the gate.

As in good flower arranging, you must remove many of the flowers you stuffed in—agonizing because you are so in love with this wild garden your imagination has made. You love that golden zinnia, but you have to sacrifice it for the sake of the composition.

Now imagination shifts and works from the inside of the composition out. (For me this process of gathering so much you feel you are bursting, and then winnowing, works better than starting with a paucity of ingredients.) Now reason, feeling, and imagination form a trio. Sometimes one member goes too far and pulls out a sprawly frond because it seems untidy, but life drains from the work. So, another member of the trio tucks that element of wildness back in. And as the trio plays and refines, the frame also shifts. The original idea shifts because the best frame sets off the work of art.

That’s it. Enough framing my thoughts on framing!