Studio Notes Two

I have never been good at adjusting to change, which feels ironic coming from someone who just moved countries twice to be with the love of their life.

It has been an incredible, terrifying, overwhelming journey to get here. Moving from the United States to Wales, getting married, and then moving to a country where I do not speak the language has radically changed who I am and how I live my life.

For a long time, I think I was in survival mode.

I am slowly peeling back habits that were formed from years and years of isolation and chosen loneliness. I am the luckiest person on the planet. I have a garden, four insane cats, and a brilliant wife who I cannot say enough good things about.

I am also realizing that I am not quite yet the person I want to be. I’m on my way there, but I am moving much slower than I would like.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I can breathe.

That should make making art easier.

Instead, it feels foreign.

I am making things again for the first time in years, and every morning I have to fight with myself to get started. Once I begin, I can work for hours and hours. The problem is never the work itself. The problem is getting to the work.

I am out of practice with my practice.

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that the artist suffering is not the way to make work. That the more needs are met the more work will be produced. My life is very good now, I have very few complaints, and the pressure has been taken off. Now I have to figure out how to redirect that energy. I was not making work when I was sad and now I’m fighting with myself to make work when my needs have all been met.

I believe that the adjustment period to a new place has something to do with that. I am still adjusting to the feeling of security.

It’s strange just how much nothing needs to happen for me to make anything.

I’ve read piles of books about creativity and artistic practice. David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. All of them touched me in a way that I can’t fully explain. Many of the techniques work for me in the short term, but I have never really stayed with them long enough to see where they lead.

I have started this blog entry about a hundred times.

I know why I am struggling to write right now, and I know why I am struggling to make work.

I am afraid of being both good and bad at it.

Frustrating, right?

Because if I am good at it and still fail, then the failure is mine. But if I am bad at it, then what was all that time for? What was art school for? What was the belief that friends and family had in me for all those years for?

If I am good at it, I have to continue to be good at it. At least that’s how creating feels right now. You don’t get to have a sophomore slump anymore; you have to keep churning out things that people want to consume.

Like most people, I just want to leave something beautiful (and weird) behind, and I am having a hard time thinking that anything I make will represent me the way that I want it to. I would like to know that this hiatus from making meant something in the long run. That I left and came back with art that means something, that tells the world who I am and what I believe.

I don’t think I care about having shows or changing the world, I just want to prove that I existed, that I made a difference to the tiny group of people that got to meet me. I think most artists just want someone to get them, to understand who they are and why their work matters to them.

Living a lot of life in between the last time I tried to make a series of work should, in theory, make the work better. The more life you’ve lived, the more you have to inject into your work. The frustrating part is that making art is very much like working out, and no matter how good your ideas are, if you don’t put them on paper, no one, including you, will ever know if they are good ideas.

Not knowing if I can “pull something off” is very silly.

I tell my students all the time that they do not have to be naturally good at drawing to get good at drawing.

So why am I so afraid of being bad?

That is a lot of pressure to put on someone so out of practice. I need to forgive myself a little for not creating because I think the anger at myself is also pervasive. Maybe I need to make art about that.

Process has always been my favourite part of making work. I love planning. I love talking about ideas. I love experimenting.

I enjoy making a piece for about seventy-five percent of its life.

Then I feel the fear of finishing.

The closer a work gets to being complete, the closer it gets to becoming real. It can succeed. It can fail. It can be judged. It can disappoint me. I can disappoint it.

Maybe that is why I have always been more interested in process than outcomes.

Or maybe that is just another excuse.

As long as it remains unfinished, all of those possibilities remain open.

Though I’m starting to think that my love for process and my fear of finishing go hand in hand. All of the things I don’t like come at the end of making art: contacting galleries or group shows, advertising yourself, talking and writing about the final piece, speaking to other people. That part of the art world is exhausting and scary.

Either way, I am making things again.

And for now, that feels like enough.

Studio Notes One

I am sitting here drinking my first cup of coffee (before I have a glass of water), I am wondering how I got to this point, how I became an artist who stopped making work. I think it is connected to the fact that, for a long time, I was a person who was afraid to exist out in the world. I went to work and came home as quickly as possible.

Two years ago that changed. I met my wife. I still go out and come home as quickly as possible, but now it is with someone that I love and trust. Love opens you up in a way that nothing else does.

For the first time in a while, I am able to breathe for a little bit, and that breathing has reopened my artistic practice. My life in Thailand allows me to make things again. I’m working on my first large canvas in years. I’m working with paint and natural dyes and fabric and thread. I am excited to get my hands dirty again. I am excited to experiment with new mediums and revisit the ones I rushed past during school in the hurry of getting a degree (learning like that shouldn’t be rushed, but that’s a different post).

There have been a lot of excuses in my life, some of them valid, some of them not so much, and many of them inflated by intense anxiety.

For a long time, numbness felt easier. Easier than being afraid. Easier than being vulnerable. Easier than being present.

I am no longer willing to be numb. My life is too good, and I have too much that I want to remember.

So the anxiety is worth it.

It is still debilitating at times, but it is worth it.

So I am starting to make things again. I am relearning to trust the process and to do things when I’m scared. Spending my life paralyzed is not an option, and now that my new life feels like my real life, I can start to draw from that as well.

The changes of the past two years have been radical, and adjusting has not been the easiest. It has been wonderful, but all change is hard.

I am also redrawing boundaries, as I used to be willing to share a lot more of myself than I am now. My world is me and my wife, and the amount of sharing, outside of a few close friends and my sister, that I’m willing to do is really limited.

I did not realize that being married would change me in that way. Some things are so sacred and healing that they belong to us, and I am not capable of giving them to the world.

Not everything needs an audience.

Maybe someday, when we are both old and give even fewer f***ks than we do now, some of that will be shared. For now, that is for us, and our definition of “that” will change.

Overall, I want to write about process, and I am not naïve enough to think people will read about process without story. I’m hoping to slow myself down. This is the longest thing I’ve written in quite a while, which feels embarrassing because it’s only five hundred and seventy-two words long. I’ve written novellas, so I also need to get my focus back because I’d like to finish writing a book.

I digress (as if this was anything other than digression).

I want to write about process because process interests me so much more than the final outcome, so much so that I never want to finish anything because then it becomes boring to me.

If something interests me, I will drag it out forever.

Perhaps that’s part of the process too.