Today started early, and as the morning progressed there was plenty of sunshine, but almost exactly at noon, the weather abruptly changed and in ten minutes time, the sky became overcast, rain began to pour down, and the power went out.

Despite having spent much of the morning doing household chores and running errands, I had tried to make good use of the sunshine while it was here, and I did crochet these two squares before everything, quite literally, went dark:

With the power out, the only light I had to work by was whatever sunlight was able to first make it through the cloud cover and then through the skylights and into my living room.

With the natural light greatly reduced as a result of the storm, I abandoned my efforts to make more of the center squares for the multicolor motifs and instead focused on weaving in the myriad ends that had accumulated.

Here are the fifteen center squares I had amassed at the time the electricity went out as seen from the back:

The myriad and ends composed of uneven lengths of yarn very much reminded me of Jackson Pollock’s work, and I thought that had he had the opportunity, he would have found that crochet was at least as accommodating a medium as the paint and canvas he favored.

So over the next few hours I wove in one end and then another, taking an occasional break to trim the ends. Eventually, I ended up with this pile of yarn scraps:

and this newly tidied array of squares:

the texture of which can be seen in greater detail here:

In speaking of his own work, Jackson Pollock said “The painting has a life of it’s own. I try to let it come through,” and that, it would seem is my central task as a crocheter: not to manipulate the yarn, but to let the yarn reveal itself.