Perhaps the most difficult virtue I’ve had to embrace this year is patience- with myself, with decision makers at various levels, and with the louder, meaner voices I’ve encountered. Regarding this school year, I am not exactly comfortable saying “the end is in sight!” yet… but it is getting closer. I learned a lot. I absorbed a lot of trauma. I was stretched in difficult ways. I’m not entirely better for it, and it’s going to take me time to recover- so I will need to be patient with myself through the summer, too.

-Knowing it is OK to take a break and be unproductive is not the same as feeling guilt-free when doing so. That’s tough.-

A while back, I wrote about the importance of creative habits. I had to let go of my studio habits this year, as my work responsibilities ballooned to gigantic proportions. If I’m being completely honest, in order to be emotionally available in the way my kids (all my kids) needed, I had to put almost everything else on hold.

I need to re-establish my artistic inertia (especially as I plan for solo shows this coming year and wrap up some commissions), BUT I am enormously grateful for having confronted my work-life boundaries.

What I really crave is the space- the mental and emotional breathing room- to explore some ideas I’ve had rattling around in my head. If I could, I’d cloister myself with some paints and books… and disappear. When I used to teach dance, sometimes I would go into the studio during my planning period, turn off the lights, turn on some music, and move without any real purpose. Freedom! Freedom from being seen. Freedom from being “productive.” Freedom and the vast, empty space to fill with whatever movement felt right. I want this as an artist, desperately.

I used to stay up late to paint. I delight in being the only one up- it is so quiet in the wee hours of the night. There’s a pleasant stillness and inherent mischief in the air, a sense that the line between possible and impossible blurs a bit. It’s a blissful solitude that I love so much.

Freedom from being seen… anybody else need that in their lives? It certainly takes on new meaning after teaching through a camera being broadcast on the internet for an entire year!

It ain’t over yet, but it will be soon. I am so, immensely, grateful for my students this year (and every year, but this year those relationships sparkle in a precious way). I pray that I have the energy and fortitude to be the human/teacher/artist/mom that they inspire me to want to be.

Some recent work, with the hope of more to come.

April. How are we here, and not here- so long?

This year has its own inertia, its own chaotic ebb and flow that at times feels like it will spiral out of my control. “Why do you never speak?”

I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.

We emerge, changed, wide eyed in the sudden sunlight. While I kept my studio space over the past year, I worked almost exclusively at home. The tides of productivity in my hands, heart and brain- unpredictable. Large scale paintings would flood out at the strangest times, in surges that wore me out afterwards. Small works, staccato, intermittent therapy.

Mostly, I felt like I was in the midst of Dry Salvages, in a contraction of creative energy. I still battle with feeling unworthy of the time to paint: undeserving the gift of time in the midst of obligation.

“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”

I began moving back into my studio two weeks ago. I’d been uncertain. I use my habits to maintain healthy inertia and work flow, and I am out of the habit of studio practice. Already an introvert, when I retreated to my home, those tendencies toward solitude swelled.

It felt really good to go in with some boxes and trash bags and get things cleared out and reorganized. I re-cleaned palettes that have sat, unused, for 13 months. I dusted paintings on lonely easels. I still need to mop, but for the first time in a long time, I feel free: lighter, unencumbered, joyful at having a dedicated space to create.

I began prepping for a solo show that had to be put off due to the pandemic, and I am finally finishing a batch of commissions that stalled out when the school year started.

It feels good to work.

I've been reading Demons, but I keep returning to the Brothers Karamazov for the truth and wisdom that burnishes a weary soul back to shining. Demons, like the Idiot, is a conceptual novel- driven by characters who represent ideas in parlor room dramas… but the Brothers K is like coming home. I find such hope in those pages: wisdom and mercy, and a keen understanding not only of what it is to be wholly human, but the sanctity of our human weaknesses that cause us to rely, beautifully, on humility, reconciliation, compassion, and love… and the one true source of those spiritual gifts.

As I roll up my sleeves in earnest, these lines “echo thus” in my mind:

“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”

To all things new, and to newly opened eyes: may we perceive our faults as blessings, and be patient with the faults we see in others. Cheers, to homecomings and happier times.

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