I am overwhelmed. Too much input these days comes through hearing, taste, touch, and sight. Overwhelming materializes in the blaring of salsa music around the corner at four in the afternoon this past Saturday. Overwhelming screams at the over seasoned rice that burns in the large aluminum sauce pot. Overwhelming is the towel with the abrasive cotton knap over my palm after being singed on the oven grating. Overwhelming is the stacked clutter around my room feigning organization. My senses are lost. I am blacking out. At this rate in the course of a week, I will scream to be blind, deaf, and dumb just to relieve all this sensory pain.
In grade school I used to pack my room in completely. I would take everything off the wall, fold up the decorative linens, clear my desk, and store my radio all in the closet with my good clothes. All else was returned around the house or neatly put away in the bureau of drawers. By then my senses felt raw and bloodied to the bone. Why did I commit to the clearing? The distraction of texture, smell, and form was to extremes I could not bare.
Today my closet is full. I cannot store another item on the floor or wedge something in on the shelf. For now I stack boxes and pile the like in several open bins. Still, the shape and colors are not restful by far. I long to shut items in behind doors. Still, it is not order I want. I want relief for my eyes. I want flat white. I want to be able to see no hue or tone. I really want no value to lend volume. I want nothing in my sight. Right now I am also confused with the minutiae of objects. A spool, a pen, and a needle are all tools and that means work. I need shut them away as well so as not to be bothered by their implications. On the surface argument I want them gone. I want no suggestion before me, let alone to know something must be repaired or what project I must prepare and gather tools and materials for. I want stillness. I want a state of no mind. I am exhausted just looking at one object. It does not move, but my mind does and there in lies the pain. It is the possibility. It is the implication. It is the mind working without the hands. I bocame exhausted and I have not moved an inch.
I wonder the life of an artist if I can not bear the mundane work of creation. I also fear I am still tired, my mind in disarray of potential and drive lies completely in eyeing an object. The work becomes conceptual for me and only realized by my peers and colleagues. Still, I wonder who else do we work so diligently for if not to be recognized.
Me and my flat white walls is a joke to some. Extra storage is behind the house for all the overflow. This space I am in must be for healing. It never fails me the white wall. It tells me my life and my future. It rails my hunger at me. It clams my fears. I swear whatever is stored in my mind is projected out onto that white space. What better way to get the problem out than to clear the space and go so far back in to the psyche that mind has no other point than to erupt. Let it propel out like a home movie played in the backyard on mama's garden linens. All comes forward and for that which does not, I am sure it can be coaxed.
Flat white, left to right
What becomes of my life tonight
Picture of what was and to be
Leave to mirror so I can look at me
Flat white, left to right
Be my dream of unending flight
Fear that may settle aside
Nothing I will fear and hide
Artlife is about the minutia and mundane as well as the financial side of art. I am trying to mind my choices as a painter, quilter, and collagist as not one of a lifestyle. If so, I would be a poser and I could walk away. As of now, I am not just grounded, I am buried in the rubric of the creator. Of it, I feel the symptoms and happenstance is what I need to write. As I always say, there are other aspects of the artists life beyond the show. The work that I rarely find discussed or presented to the public, I want to put here in this blog. Hmm. Commitments of words again. The next juncture on the journey, you leave for tonight. Find Van Gogh's painting of his room on the second floor of the restaurant. Research to see if Gauguin did as well. Think about the quarters where you live. How do they shape your work? What do you remember of those spaces? Commit to a few words about morning rituals, cleanliness, light and shadow through the afternoon, the sacred order of rest in this place you dwell for health and recreation. Commit to a sketch but above all else learn to keep your quarters sacred. Whether you are like me, splitting duty between rest and studio work in one room, or you have the privilege of a secured holy domain for sleep and healing.
As ever, stay hungry and curious.