Weird sense of excitement and relief.
I’ve started work covering a fellow artist’s research sabbatical. I’m just waiting for Human Resources to make me a formal offer for the fixed term contract, other than that it’s all going well. Well, it will be once IT come and update the computer I’m working on, connect it to the network and the printer! I think I’ll really enjoy it.
I’ll still keep on with one of my current part-time jobs, though I’ll be working more weekends. This is great – Perhaps it’s due to my Protestant(?) work ethic but I know I’m much more likely to go the studio on a weekday than on a Sunday. So working alternate Sundays rather than Mondays means I’m likely to spend Mondays in the studio. The more Monday to Friday days I spend in the studio the more I feel like an artist.
So this is the last of my six-day working weeks. I’ve only done it for three weeks but I’m exhausted. Perhaps starting Swedish lessons at the same time has been a bit much (that and the fact that I do three jobs over those six days – not counting trying to keep an eye on my practice).
The other evening I realised that one of things I really enjoy about my Swedish class is that it has nothing to do with art. It’s not visual at all. After all these years it’s refreshing to do something that obviously uses a different part of my brain. Until I started these classes going to the gym was about the only thing I did that wasn’t directly visual or visual related. After art school it’s so hard to go to a gallery, museum, film, theatre show, shop(!) without it somehow being part of my work or research. It’s great doing something that uses different skills – where how I sound and what I remember are more important than how something looks and how it makes me feel. Right now Swedish is beautifully abstract to me.
