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.

So far so good

Taking a quick break to post an update. Things are progressing much faster than I’d feared. For now my plan is to work towards the goal of getting the 6′ table set up to form an L-shaped workspace, so I pretty much just worked on clearing the assorted debris off the floor. (You can see before pictures of the space shown in this photo here and here, to get an idea of how cluttered this area looked earlier in the day.) The table is now stacked pretty high with stuff, but I cleared some large items out of the room to make more space. A couple of extra large bins are being moved to the basement, the small set of shelves got relocated to the living room, and the chairs were folded and stashed in the hallway for the time being.

So while I am by no means done cleaning, I’m pretty darn pleased with how much progress I’ve made. Once that table is up I should have a nice chunk of space to start sorting things out in more detail.

Gearing up to tidy up

Before I get started cleaning I wanted to grab a few “Before” pictures. Here’s a shot of the closet in the studio… buried under a pile of artsy rubble! I need to dig it out, there are lots of fun treasures in there.

As eager as I am to uncover those treasures and start playing full time, I think today and tomorrow I need to focus on just getting the bare bones of the cleaning dealt with. In the longterm, I need the space to be where I work on art; playing, exploring and finding my muse. But in the short term I need to clear off chairs – chairs make very good tables, as an artist knows – and find places for the things that have migrated to the floors so that I can set up my 6′ folding table. My buds and I will need a nice chunk of table space and plenty of seating so that we can iron out the details of the retreat.

Check out more photos of my studio, including some older ones at other periods of messification, at my Flickr photostream. I hope to be making more updates both here and in my photostream as the clean-up progresses. But at this point I’m just procrastinating, so I’ll say sayonara for now!

Tidying and teaching

Tomorrow I’ll be working to get my studio straightened up. Not an uncommon activity for an artist – we’re not the most organized people in the world, as the demand for the Studios issue of Cloth Paper Scissors can attest – but this will be as much reacquainting myself with my studio and my supplies as it is the usual tidying up of half-finished projects.

Some of my friends from the NEATC Meetup will be visiting on Thursday, to work on plans for our first weekend retreat. I’m so looking forward to the retreat; it’s a peer-led retreat, and I’ll be running a couple of great activities. I’m eager to stretch my artistic wings learning new things at others’ workshops and flexing my teaching muscles as well. My hope is hat teaching will be part of my destiny as an artist. I love to share, and I love to learn – teaching is both.