Today my husband and I went for a long, long walk, and I poured out my heart to him. All my concern about my manic midnight brain waves, my self-doubt about my work, my concern about my lack of motivation, my general miasma. What a great word, miasma! It sounds like mired plasma, or miserable disastah. Just how I feel.
It doesn't even seem to help to just go into the studio to do the work. I'm overwhelmed with preparations for my upcoming show. The preparations are overwhelming me, taking away from the time to actually make the artwork the show is FOR. And that's what everything has become--about getting the art out there, but not much time for making the art. Which I'm unsure and conflicted about anyway, so finding myself not willing to make time for it. What's the use???
He had some good thoughts, and told me to be patient with the process. Some of the things he said reminded me of a conversation I had last week with a young artist from England. Reinvention is what artists do, he had said. Artists constantly change the way they interpret the world and tell their story to a larger audience--it's what art is all about. The process may be painful and slow, especially the agonizing over the "loss of faith" feeling. But it is necessary for growth and change.
Actually, it sucks bigtime.
I decide to come into the studio even for a brief time today, just to say I did.
In my e-mail inbox is an e-zine I subscribe to called "Sculptural Pursuit". You can view it here: http://www.sculpturalpursuit.com/
Two articles hit me like a sledgehammer.
The first is an article by John Ostlund called "Get Me A Shaman!" Mr. Ostlund seems to have been reading my mind lately. He seems caught in the same funk, and wonders if he should call in a shaman to heal his spiritual/artistic woes. (I think I'm going back on prescription drugs, myself....)
He quotes that line by Henry David Thoreau, the one that says "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
Which is worse? Suspecting you have no song? Or knowing you do, but that you have not done what you should to get it out into the world?
In the end, he comes to the same conclusion I do. The further we get away from doing our art--even when we aren't sure what our art IS anymore--the more off-center EVERYTHING gets. The only way to get everything back on track is to go to the studio and do the work. He commits to working directly on his sculpture one hour a day, confident that the discipline will work its magic and ground him to his spirit once again.
The second is an artist profile called "Sterett-Gittings Kelsey: An Accidental Sculptor Creates Beauty Through Discipline"
By Marilyn Noble. A few sentences open a window for me; the artist's infant daughter becomes profoundly ill, and soon "the young family’s life revolved around hospitals and medical treatments. When Gitty recovered, Kelsey found that the unrelenting discipline that caring for her daughter demanded sparked her creative life. She no longer had to wait for inspiration to strike; ideas poured from her and came to life in wax maquettes."
“This forced regimen of the past year, which had nothing to do with art, had only to do with discipline. And discipline is freedom!” She adds, “I doubt that I could have become a sculptor had it not been for salmonella meningitis. All of my education would have been useless in any meaningful way. Without the freedom of discipline, quite simply, these works would never have been produced.”
Discipline. Doing the work. Doing the work even when doing the work is not satisfying and is not rewarding. Even when you can't see where it's taking you or where you will end up with it.
I've heard this three times in one day. Let's see if I can get the message and put it into practice, without involving an actual tragedy in my life.
The clincher is another e-mail, from the artist I met for hot chocolate last week. When are we getting together again?? she demands. The artist group thing sounds like fun! The critique-support-feedback session sounds great! It does, I realize. I e-mail another artist to get the ball rolling.
Hmmmm....sounds like I need to make something new to take to the meeting.
Back to work.
