It's not painting, but it felt like art

As an antidote to posts where I toss in a photo of a painting that I feel fell short of my goal, and as a diversion from the parade of work that is more exercise than success, I think I will post a few photos of earlier work I have done in an entirely different field.  I spent many years designing and building homes, and frequently that work gave me great creative satisfaction.

This home was built on 5 acres on the Tualatin River with rich alluvial soil.  I designed it after a trip to the south of France and the influence shows in the round three story tower at the back, the yellow of the stucco, and the fields of flowers out back.  For years I planted a large field in sunflowers, which added to the French feel.  The smaller building is a barn for storage.

                                

 The following house was influenced by both English and French design, with the herringbone brick nogging over native basalt stonework and the half-hipped gables.  For some reason this has remained one of my favorites, perhaps because it was so hard for me; I redrew the plans entirely three times, trying to break from my habitual style.  Sometimes we just have to love the most difficult child.  In this photo the house is nearly completed.

This kitchen is from yet another house, and it was quite successful in layout, very easy to work in, open to a great room on one side and a dining room on the other.

While I would love the challenge of building more homes, the market is not entirely conducive to the levels of risk involved, and I have moved on to other pursuits, but the need to create must find an outlet somewhere, hence my foray into painting.  Enough of the past for now.

It took a great deal of courage to begin a project as daunting as building a home: hundreds of thousands of dollars were at stake; failure and loss was always a possibility; the scope of the thousands of decisions and tasks was bewildering.  If I had waited to think through the entire thing before beginning, I would have been unable to proceed.  So I began with a concept, a plan that was well-considered, and a rough outline of the flow of work to be done and the confidence that I could do it and then I just plunged in blindly.  I dealt with issues daily as they came up.  I need to be able to translate some of the skills of this one type of work to what is needed in order to paint.  Why is it that we can do well at one thing, for example hold a job and show up to work everyday on time, week after week, year after year, and yet when we try to do something else, write a novel, for example, we procrastinate, waste time, can't harness the necessary effort?  Writers will tell us that first you just have to show up and start writing every day.  And yet most people who try to write will fail at this one basic principle.  What is it about the creative act that we set apart from all other sorts of work and treat differently?  What is it that makes it so elusive and causes us to be our own worst enemy?