Beyond London and into the second week
One of the first things I did last week, on experiencing feelings of panic and tightness when looking at a full April spreadsheet with apparently not enough time off or studio time, was to rejig it, in the hope of changing my mental attitude; it’s hard to be creative from a place of tightness. So I reframed (that word is a good candidate for artist bingo) my ‘research trip to London’ as time off, and colourcoded anything to do with creative activity in pleasing shades of pink or peach. For example, admin – applications, website etc – is a necessary underpinning for creative activity. It’s certainly a more attractive spreadsheet now (maybe I’ll paint it at the end of this) but I still feel anxious. Why? I’m sure I have more studio time available than a lot of people. Though that’s part of the anxiety – why aren’t I as effective and motivated as I perceive other people to be? Really not a helpful question to even be asking, and I suspect my whole creative flow will unblock once I relax a bit more about my current lack of output.
Which leads me on to another mental exercise I’m putting into action: tolerating imperfection. This means leaving things undone at home, and not always keeping working until things are finished and I’m knackered and don’t have time to do anything else, but having a strict 5pm cut-off. I feel sick at the thought. A friend of mine once did a Zen retreat where retreatants were allocated tasks throughout the day; every hour a bell sounded, and retreatants stopped what they were doing, no matter where they were up to, and moved on to the next activity. It sounds fascinating – I always want to get things finished, otherwise I experience a mental discomfort similar to craving a cigarette. Plus, because I feel an internal pressure to get things done as soon as they pop into my head, it makes it hard to prioritise – everything seems both important and urgent. Leaving things undone, even though they’re niggling me, will be an interesting corrective to this habit – I hope – and allow me to learn to set aside some of the non-essential things that get in the way of creative work.
How well am I managing to keep to schedule? Well so far everything has gone to plan, apart from two half days of admin encroaching on my days off. It’s very hard to prioritise relaxing over ‘essential’ admin, but is that just part of a tendency to add more and more tasks to the list while avoiding getting down to the most important and scary stuff – making work? Next week will tell, when I have my precious three days of studio time scheduled in. Already they’re coming under threat, from the need to do some exercise (which I hope will boost my energy and motivation) and to deal with a household vermin infestation I discovered last night at bedtime.
Having just come back from my art binge in London, there are lots of things I want to try out – covering apples in gloss paint to see how they decompose (I’ve done it before with emulsion, it’s very enjoyable and beautiful), experimenting with varnish, thinking about all the beautiful small objects I saw in the Ice Age Art, Schwitters and Duchamp/Rauschenberg/Cage/Johns/Cunningham exhibitions, playing with oil and tempera. My plan is to do what I feel like for a bit, rather than what I feel I ought to be doing, and fool myself into making work that way. Mmm covering apples in gloss and then painting them! And seeing how the patterns change as the apples shrivel! And I’ve just bought some neoliberal classics to grow mushrooms on, am a bit sad that I don’t have time to read them but I need to get the mushrooms going so that they can be drawn at the end of the month. So it looks like that’s tomorrow’s day off turned over to mushroom propagation already…
