I can’t really write my blog entry because I am not working on art. I can’t think of anything to show you. The truth is, Life has gotten in the way of art.
It’s hard to admit this. But I feel I am not the only one who has gotten in this disagreeable place.
Sometimes keeping art in my life as a living flourishing thing is like trying to keep alive a very delicate flower that needs a certain kind of soil and air temperature and filtered water from a certain spring and I don’t even know what all and it’s hard.
My studio was in my apartment. But I had to move out of my apartment, and kind of in a hurry. Because I have no sense of space in the third dimension, I thought that all my stuff would fit into the smaller new apartment. Wow, it totally doesn’t.
I will have to find studio space outside of the apartment, a big pain in the… no, must try not to be negative on blog.
There’s this part of Patti Smith’s Just Kids that really resonates with me. There is a point where she and Robert Mapplethorpe are moving from one place to another for like the forty seventh time. Just seeing their portfolios, pencils, art books, everything- all packed up and ready to be hauled- she gets depressed, defeated feeling. Just from the physicalness of the STUFF. (I would quote this for you, but my Just Kids book is packed in one of the boxes and as good as lost at the moment.) For a moment, she just wants to throw all the damn stuff away and become a busker or something.
I’m a painter so obviously my artworks are physical; a painting is an object. The space I need to make paintings is very physical- I mean the space matters. It has to have light. It has to be clean. It has to be quiet. It has to be private. If even one small thing is out of place that does not belong to that painting’s particular mess, it drives me crazy and I can’t work.
That’s not the same for all painters but for me… Sometimes I envy conceptual artists, and writers. When I write, it’s different. The room can be a mess and I wouldn’t even notice. It could be a lovely quiet room, a library, somebody’s closet, a bus, a coffee shop. The workspace is far away in the infinite space of my mind and nothing can harm it.
Until things settle, what can I do?
What about a sketchbook? Brooke, did you forget being a student and carrying the sketchbook around everywhere, a safe refuge from crowded Brooklyn apartments and art schools with a lockout?
Maybe this is a chance to discover a new way.
