Fool For Art

December 2014:
The show is framed.  From here on out it is all fun until the day it gets hung on the walls. Whew.

Way back in August I began the process, now five large paintings, six drawings, four traditional prints, four digital prints are ready.  Everything is new, guess I can still work when I have the space.

The space is the one in my mind and in my being.  Today I started out at home and was interrupted not less than a dozen times.  12X!  How can anybody work when there is not time to put two thoughts and feelings together? Time, not in isolation so much as in safety, of freedom, exploration and expanse.

Since I have had space, my entire life has changed.  The family still begs attention, but I wake up with ideas in my head.  I am happy.  I am whole again.  Artists must not be led down paths of service to the world which do not involve their work; it kills.

February 2015:
Now that I lack the physical space, the metaphysical has vanished as well. Thoughts no longer pop in my head with abandon;  depression and dullness reside there with great spreading wealth.

My entire creative life  from high school to the present day, now lives in a spare bedroom. Every crisis, joy and confusion, visually documented, lies in piles of paper, canvas and pigment.  When I die, what will they do with this debris?  I imagine the same as they will do with my body, burn it.  I have cleaned out the houses of many elderly women who have been forced to downsize.  We pick through the vestiges of their lives, hopes, dreams, joys and sorrows.  No life goes without inspection of detritus, with or without judgement.

Years ago I threw out a self portrait made in my twenties.  In it, I sported a strapless blue bikini top and blue jeans.  I placed the painting outside for the trash men; it was taken from the trash.  I was flattered and oddly embarrassed.  I wonder where I am, half dressed.  Am I dart board?  The painting was mounted on plywood.

The truth is that when paintings leave the studio, I have no control over them and if  I choose to make images of myself then I have no control over that momentary aspect of myself.  When the time comes for me to leave the studio, permanently, I will have no say in the dispersal of my life's work, nor will I care. So do I dispose of work now via the trash or do I try to sell or give it away?  Does that become my life's work?  The walls of my studio, like those of the Death Star's trash compactor, are closing in. I must act or be swallowed by personal history.

As I no longer have an empty, quiet space in which to work, it seems that I have few options. "Growing old is not for sissies;" growing old for artists is not for the weak-stomached nor for the sentimental. Alas I am both.