Continuing to Create

 

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow — that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

Leo Tolstoy

 

How do you keep creating when your art studio is almost completely empty? When water damage has changed your house and your life? At the end of January, over ten and a half weeks ago, freezing temperatures caused a pipe inside the bedroom wall to burst, soaking parts of the bedroom carpet, trailing into hallway. Although plumbers fixed the leak the same day, it’s been an extremely long process to dry out, repair, and restore the damage. And I’m still in the repair phase after all this time.

The damage in my studio was not visible but the wall was affected so the service company packed out almost everything in both rooms to work on the water mitigation. Part of the wall in each room as well as all the carpet and all the wood floor had to be ripped up, dried out with multiple fans and de-humidifiers. The next step was fixing the walls with insulation, drywall, texture, and paint.

Right now, I have a rolling computer cart, a chair, and some floor lamps in my studio. Everything thing else has either been relocated in other areas of the house or packed and moved into a storage pod in the driveway.

The amount of destruction and removal of items seemed out of proportion to the initial leak. Yet, I know it could have been much worse. I know I’m privileged to have a house and a dedicated place to create.

So, I’m waiting. It requires patience, endurance, worry, and discomfort. The unknown stares me in the face daily. When I wonder when my normal life will resume, I realize that this is my new normal just now. It might not last forever but it certainly does feel like it. Two intimate rooms—my studio and our bedroom—has seen a parade of strangers in and out.

As I wait, I think.

What is the nature of a home? Before they packed up items in both rooms, I moved out things I might need. For how long, I didn’t know. Every estimate has fallen flat. Until they removed the last of the carpet and wood floor, I lived on little islands of flooring on the cement slab. Now, it’s just the cement slab. Living with stress, uncertainty, with loss, with less. Sounds and music echoes in the high ceiling because it’s bare of shelves, books, desks, paintings, and supplies. In my mind I can almost hear my late husband saying, “Well, we’re camping out now,” in his humorous take on events. But he isn’t here any longer, gone almost three years now. And it’s still hard being here without him, in the place where we both had lived the longest.

What is the nature of stuff? When we moved to this house my focus was on writing, a hobby that does not require a lot of supplies. But then I got interested in art and painting and my interest shifted.

What possession do I really need? What do I actually use now? What craft was a passing phase? Do I own these possessions or do they own me? Can curiosity lead to clutter? Since the Pandemic, I have done a lot less spontaneous craft shopping, which is certainly a good thing.

So, I’ve begun to look at things with a more critical eye. And I know I when I finally get to unpack all my stuff, I’ll take a hard look at each item and decide whether to keep, to recycle, to donate, or to discard it.

Now to answer the original question I posed in the beginning of this post. Although I tried doing some collage, a little play in journals, I couldn’t focus or continued those. But once I set up a card table and began working steadily in a small unbound journal, already holding a mix of paper and fiber pages, something clicked. Yes, you can create under less than ideal circumstances. You can have a project that holds your attention and allows you to take a break from reality. You can have art and play transport you while your hands play with texture and color.

 

“All things must pass.”

George Harrison

 

“Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”

Robert Hayden

Places as Creative Inspiration

Working, visiting, or living in a unique and beautiful space can enrich life as well as inspire creativity.

 

Recently I had the good fortune to be invited to tour a geodesic dome home in another city. It was an amazing experience.

Since then, it’s made me remember that I’ve been interested in distinctive architecture since I was in high school and did a report about the future using book and magazine images. One school library book was about Arcosanti, a community in Arizona, which had blueprints for a distinct city community. 

 

 

A few years later I started working full-time in a triangular, futuristic building. Although the insurance agency had a break room, I often ate lunch downstairs on the ground level atrium that had tables, chairs, and plants. I would happily read, write, or sketch in this special space. I tried to capture the interesting interior views but neither my drawings nor old photos could do it justice.

My second job was also in an interesting bank and office building. Inside was an open rectangular area lined with four floors of offices. The main level had a sitting area with plants and a small food establishment. I loved taking breaks and lunches there, also.

What’s interesting is that when both businesses re-located, I did not stay too long afterward before getting a new job. Back then, my creative focus was fiction writing and I frequently needed to escape from company lunch rooms and found the new structures somewhat ugly and uninspiring with no beautiful open areas,

 

My current position is situated on a beautiful, small campus. Working here over three decades, I’ve seen inspirational buildings and landscapes. But I have also witnessed many of them demolished. There was once a delightful walking trail with open skies, animals, wild flowers, trees, and shrubs. I would stroll the area in all seasons and all weather, often capturing memorable images. It was a nature break that gave my legs a stretch and my mind and spirit solace. It no longer exists.

In my travels, I have visited many beautiful structures.

Portmeirion in Wales holds many diverse buildings that were rescued and moved to form a unique little village. It has a hotel and cottages to rent.

 

New Mexico, a place where my husband and I dreamed of moving, holds beautiful Native American community pueblos. There is also the innovative Earthships in Taos, which we visited in 1998.

 

There are ascetic beehive huts in western Ireland that sheltered ancient monks. And the entrance to the Cliffs of Moher is built into the earth.

 

When our city built a large new main public library, I volunteered to lead tours through it on opening day. It’s a large, open, colorful space that celebrates books and learning. 

Before we moved, I was very interested in alternative housing and read various books about underground, adobe, dome, thick stone, and straw bale homes. Using a blank sketchbook, I created a New Home Book. Again, I clipped magazine and online images and created a dream book of ideas and inspiration. I even used an old photo from Life magazine showing the inside of a dome home.

Of course, my husband and I were not rich so we ended up getting a traditional house. But, it was not like anything either of us had lived in before. There were high ceilings with two clerestory windows in the living room. He dubbed our new digs “The Observatory” because we could watch sunlight move during the day and see the moon rise during the night. 

 

One bedroom was set up as my writing room. Back then, the area had not been built up yet. Outside the window was a field where I saw deer and wildflowers as well as beautiful oak tree that I named “Madame Oak.” I began photographing beautiful sunsets and aligning furniture to observe them.

I began reading newspaper listings for gallery and art exhibits and started viewing local as well as famous paintings. I took a simple continuing education class, an introduction to acrylic painting, which altered my ideas and perspectives.

 So, our dwelling began to affect me and shifted my creative outlet from writing to painting. Reading art blogs, I became curious about bookbinding, took classes, and learned to make journals to hold experiments in my expanding visual vocabulary. There is always something new to learn and I became interested in other expressions such as gel printmaking.

Marcel Proust said, “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

I understand what he’s saying. But for me, visiting new landscapes, living or working in beautiful and inspiring places has led to many new creative discoveries. Amazing places stir my imagination and revives my spirit. And has changed my life.

The Long Road Creating The Comfort Journal

 

In the hot and unbearable Summer of 2023, I thought of making a Comfort Journal using already painted papers and fabrics.

 

Instead of binding the book and then working in and on the pages, I left them loose and worked on each page spread at a time. This made for a lot of signatures of varying thicknesses. I had planned on using 6” x 6” canvas boards and using my usual sewn-over-tapes binding method. But as the pieces evolved, I thought of using a leather cover and doing a long stitch through the spine. So I cut a thick piece of leather and fused denim from an old pair of jeans inside. But the result felt too bulky and inflexible.

 

My next idea was to use upholstery leather and to leave it unlined. The color combination with the ---teal?—Irish linen thread looked beautiful but before adding a concho closure, it felt too floppy and unstable. Could I could save it by using a leather belt or strap to hold everything together? No, I didn’t like either the look or the feel.

 

So, back to my favorite binding method because the pages needed to be more rigid. Sewing the signatures together would also tighten and compress the spine. To keep the first and last pages as they were, I needed to add end papers [so I would not glue the first and last signatures to the covers]

 

Sewing up the signatures but before gluing the canvas boards, I realized I had forgotten the “tapes”! Would I have to cut away all the Irish linen thread, remove all 10 signatures, and re-sew the whole book again? Could I weave the canvas “tapes” up through the threads of outer spine? It took some doing--using a paint palette knife, jewelry pliers, and lots of patience--but I was able attach the tapes, finish the sewing, and then glue the covers on.

 

Two days of weighing it down, my book press consisting of two heavy volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, I was happy to see the results. The book held together well.

 

The long and winding road to complete this book made me declare the book complete. But I may yet add a decorative cover of crochet around it, like a book dust jacket.