The Trick to Getting to the Studio in the Morning is...

Promise yourself the second cup of coffee IN the studio.

Don’t think ahead.

Have food for the hungry crows. Be prepared.

Go To the Studio even if you have to go back to the house right away for the crow food you forgot anyway. Just be sure to leave something very valuable behind, like the computer for instance. Then go ahead and just try to finish the house chores knowing that your entire life is at risk if you don’t get back in fifteen seconds flat.

Drink the coffee and stare at the latest painting for a while.

Funny, how the clamor inside my head silences when I really start looking at paint. When I really start looking at anything.

Actually Everything is More Complicated Than It Appears At First

I looked up the article regarding the expanding universe obliterating all traces of its own beginning, because if there is one thing I trust, it’s that my memory is a creative process and has its own very definite set of rules about reliability.

But there WAS an article. Hooray! Here it is.

But wait. The situation is worse than I said. Apparently the total disconnect that we’re all destined to cosmically share is the fault of Dark Energy. Well. How could I have forgotten that crucial point? Especially after the last eight years?

Of course, Dark Energy is always with us. It’s part of the Force. You can’t separate light from shadow and have either exist independently.

Still, it’s easy for me to say that vase over there is blue. But the shadow? At lunchtime I’d swear it was almost pure blue but now I’m hard pressed to say if it’s more violet than brown. Once you look into darkness, matters of color and form become very shifty and depend entirely on your point of view.

Impossible to tell where anything stops, or even begins.

I'd Do More If I Knew How

I’d write more if only I knew what to write about what it is that I don’t know.

What I don’t know is vast and multiplying at a frightening rate.

Je suis desolée.

The universe is expanding.
The universe is hiding all traces of its beginning.
Pretty soon it won’t look like it’s expanding anymore.
How will anyone know anything?

I come into the studio in the morning and go to work. Well, that’s one way to describe my slow process. What I suspect I actually do is leave the planet for a lengthy period of time; it seems from the slow progress of the present painting that I must spend a great deal of time traveling in hyperspace. I’ve certainly spent the last two weeks not getting right the same set of ellipses that define a rusted tin can. When I come back from my travels, everything is almost the same as before, although not exactly.

Outside the studio is a small garden mobbed with mostly silent crows. They’ve been watching all this time and could tell you more than me.

Work Doesn't Always Happen in the Studio

The business of being an artist seems to require a lot of business. I’m under no illusions about the importance of my art to other people- but it’s wildly important to me. Or so I thought until I started taking a look at my process of documentation.

I know Twyla Tharp works with boxes. Whenever she starts a new project, she opens a new cardboard box. It’s sort of a reverse Pandora system. Every note, every idea, color sample, picture, comment, cd, dvd, lists, telephone numbers- ANYTHING she feels might be or could be relevant to her project goes into that new box as she works on her project. At the end of the project, the box is closed up tight and put on a shelf. Ta dum. Instant cataloguing with complete documentation.

They must be pretty big boxes. Her work is great.

My system is a little different. It’s an ex post facto system. I must have at least 20 Ikea magazine boxes labeled Sort, More Sort, and Sort Now. I also have piles of half finished projects and collage materials in process stacked in piles which are stacked on shelves and in cubbies and also baskets. Like Twyla, I also use boxes, but they are of every size and description, from large white Ikea boxes to photo and shoe boxes. I also enthusiastically use the floor.

Once I had some very expensive photographs taken of my work by an incredibly fine photographer. He was in a hurry when I went to pick up the slides and so he gave the delicate film squares to me unmounted. “Here, he said, ”All you have to do is slide them into mounts, it’s easy. You know how to do that, right? I’ve got to go, I’m late.“

The transparencies were in an envelope. And no, I didn’t know how to do it and was too shy to ask. Instead, I think I first put them onto a shelf in our home office, a shelf of (guess what!) unsorted papers. Then I’m pretty sure, almost, they went into a box, possibly named ”Studio.“ That’s my last clear memory of those pictures. This was in 2001, I believe, and at least three studio moves ago.

Funny how a person never stops looking for the lost.....

But I’ve been thinking about the documentation process all this time (seven years) and last week finally Began To Work. So, instead of going to the studio, I worked at getting what photographs I had into order. I began on Monday with just the digital photographs which were scattered on several computers and three extra hard drives. Five days later, I THINK all the digital photographs are corralled into one computer, one program, one (backed up twice) file. There are over 11,000 photos and nearly all of them are bad. Or duplicates. Somewhere in that huge tangle are maybe thirty photographs of some of my work.

I will never take another bad photograph again.

I will never KEEP another bad photograph again.

I WILL label and keyword all photos with the zeal of a nuclear mechanic.

That said, at the end of the week, after more than twenty hours of diligent sorting, I still felt like I hadn’t been doing any REAL work because I hadn’t been painting and I hadn’t been in the studio. Painting, says my inner overseer, is the only Real Work. But no. Something has changed: I tackled a huge job and I didn’t give up. The whole project of getting my work in order may not be completed, but I did undertake and complete an important stage using every bit of tenacity and determination I could muster. This is a real accomplishment for me; once again I’ve learned the same thing I always learn. The lesson is: take care. Take more care. Pay attention. Love the process. I guess I’m here to tell me that any action done with attention, care, and a compassionate heart is the Right Work.

And that’s good studio practice, even if it isn’t happening in the studio.

“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.” Annie Dillard begins her book Holy The Firm (and every morning) with a weather eye cocked on the forces that Already Are.

It’s a good policy.

I usually discover the god (or goddess) of the day after the third or fourth coincidence and nearly always after my second cup of coffee. Often the god of the day is Dropit!, a jokester who sees to it that anything I hold in my hand falls to the floor the instant my attention wavers. There’s another god who loves to hide things. His name seems to be **!!#%$! - he stopped by just last week to collect my favorite turquoise sunglasses.

Today’s god was in charge of studio conversations. I’d been feeling progressively more isolated after a week of solitary daily studio practice. As well, my slowly recovering health has meant keeping social interactions to a minimum. So today’s guy, TalkShop, saw to it that I had two long. lovely phone calls from dear friends in the morning, an actual visit from another dear friend at lunchtime, and two visits from postmen, one in the morning and one in the afternoon to make sure that the one in the morning had gotten his numbers right.

I did get my palette out and managed to paint half a leaf before the energy meter ran out and I had to shut up shop. A day of small work. Cleaning up, I regretted that I have too many colours on the palette lately. Prep time takes nearly forty minutes which adds considerably to the energy deficit. I began this painting so simply with just five colours and am now up to ... fourteen! I haven’t a clue what to about it, given the complexity of the greens of the salal leaves and seductive excellence of the paint (Vasari Oil Colors). I remember reading about Morandi’s amazement at the complexity of the colours of the Italian landscape near Grizzana. “Can you believe it-I actually saw seventy shades of green...!” *

Too many colours are like having too many conversations going on all at once in a small room. The clamor can be dizzying and it’s hard to pay close attention to what really matters. I was lucky to have my conversations today one at a time.

It was a good day. Once I understood to whom the day belonged.


*(Bornfeld, Ab. Giorgio Morandi: Seventy Shades of Green. Morandi Editions, 1997. p74.)