“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
