Planting seeds of art and naps

I am slowly planting little seeds of healing within myself. With a little help from Sark’s “Change Your Life Weithout Getting Out of Bed” nap guidebook, I am practicing the fine art of therapeutic napping. As a lifelong insomniac, this is hard work but very important. Healing my relationship with sleep is vital to healing myself. By the same token, I’m reading bits and pieces of everything I can get my hands on to learn how to heal my relationship with art.

I’ve taken two or three micronaps in the past few days, and I think I’m getting better at them. Yesterday I finally did a few little art bits, just embellishing projects I’d started or noodling around with pre-painted ATC backgrounds. I could feel even these baby steps working to nourish me though. When the paint bled through a piece and onto the table I scooped up the puddles of color with a scrap of an envelope, and wrote a little note for myself.

Intangible work is HARD work

It’s amazing to me how tiring intangible work like mental, emotional, and spiritual progress can be. After I finished yesterday’s post, I set a goal to spend as much time as I could in the studio before my sweetie got home from work at 6:30. Nothing else required, just spend time there and work to heal my artistic wounds by relearning how to be comfortable with my art. I folded laundry, read a magazine, thought, wrote down ideas, tidied up. By the end of the day I was exhausted; I sat on the couch, wrapped up in my favorite blanket, and cried. It wasn’t even a sad cry exactly, I just needed the emotional release. Later, after dinner, I took a cue from SARK and took a much-needed nap.

Despite how draining it is, it’s important work. I plan to continue to spend as much time in my studio as I can. It’s a little like telling a child who can’t fall asleep “Go to bed. You don’t have to sleep, you just have to rest.” You know that if they do, sleep will eventually follow. I don’t have to make art, I just have to get comfortable with being in my studio. Art will follow.

Intangible work involves fighting a daily war against the Ghosts of Criticisms past. Just thinking about creating art with the same kind of abandon as I did in high school makes a thousand whiny, critical voices in my head rear up with objections like “But what would you DO with all that artwork?” Our world is all about the tangible, the monetary, the useful. So the idea of churning out page after page of artwork seems hideously indulgent to my societal training. To the question “What would you do with all that art?” I am learning to shout back, “I WILL HEAL!” (And if the Ghosts still demand something more “sensible” I can tell them that I will give it away as gifts or sell it on Etsy.)

It seems that as the new year approaches, I’m not the only one thinking about the challenge of starting. After posting yesterday, I curled up with the latest issue of Cloth Paper Scissors and was delighted to find Nic Hohn’s article “Action is the Art of Doing”, which dealt with just the sort of issues I explored yesterday. The practical suggestions Nic offers only reinforce the idea that journalling could be a very productive tool for me. Later on, I was exploring SARK’s book Living Juicy: Daily Morsels for Your Creative Soul, which is set up to optionally be read one page per day, and found that the topic of the first week of pages is Procrastination. Is it the time of year to think about these things, or is it serendipity?

The image in this post is a painting I did in high school or middle school, that I finally got around to hanging today. Click on it to view a bigger version on Flickr.