You know Degas? The French artist who painted all those dancers?  His ballet dancers are so ubiquitous that I see them more as friendly, familiar wallpaper than as art, and yet when I saw one of his paintings recently, it kept pulling at me, and I wasn’t sure why.  I started wondering about the way the main figure was placed so far to the right, leaving so much empty floor space of the dance studio behind her, and then it hit me that the dancer was poised to turn and move into that space.  The painting was alive with this strange tension, this potential for movement, and it drew my eye back and forth. The painting made my mind supply the dance.

How cool is that?

I love when I discover something by seeing things in a new way.  My favorite artists have weird, playful, or political things popping from their work.  Their paintings and sculptures urge me to be brave, to write with conviction, to explore and create.

I’m experimenting with my writing, toying with a new idea in the 12^th draft of a novel I thought was finished before I talked to my editor this afternoon.  I’m excited to mess around with it, and I suspect the reason why I’m so ready is because last week, I saw a dancer teetering in a painting. Thanks, Degas.