Art for Art's Sake

Lately I’ve been thinking about the creative process. I've been wondering about certain ideas and where these ideas come from and how they take form.

Take, for example, this creation. It's hard to tell by looking at the photo, but this thing stands somewhere between four and five feet tall, and as a wild guess, I would say it’s probably is made up of at least 50-75 pine cones. Somebody obviously put in a great deal of time and effort creating this thing. It stands proudly at the front of a store that I pass by on my way home from work everyday. And everyday, I wonder about it.

I wonder how this thing started off. I wonder if it started off as one of those pine cone bird feeders or maybe a Christmas wreath and it somehow spiraled insanely out of control. Was somebody just sitting there, building and building, as it morphed into it’s current incarnation?

Or did somebody actually sit down with the preplanned idea of creating this in mind? I wonder what inspired it. It must have taken many weeks of collecting pine cones in the woods, and many more weeks sitting in the dark basement, glue gun in hand, one by one assembling the pine cones into this haunting shape. What drives a person to do this?

Then again, it could be something as simple as somebody who finally figured out what to do with that pile of pine cones and chicken wire they were saving in their garage.

Or maybe it's there as some kind of warning.

However this thing came to be, I hope that the artist has gotten it out of his or her system.