Seven weeks of silence

It has been that long since I last posted.  There have been distractions.  When I revived this blog, it was in part to talk about the journey into becoming a practicing artist.  Distractions, I admit, are integral to that process; another word would be avoidance.

Around the time of the last post, I started to feel a sense of imbalance in my life, more particularly a dearth of worldly obligations.  The first part of my life was spent diligently and earnestly trying-to-make-the-world-a better-place.  Eventually I learned: the "world" is much, much bigger and more powerful than I am... so I laid down my tools.  Took myself off the hook.  Surrendered.  And that opened the door to taking care of myself for a change.  Among other things, I went off to NSCAD University to pursue what I had once considered an impossible dream.

Fast forward to January 2016, and all of a sudden I began to feel over-weighted on the self-indulgent side and a little too indifferent to the common good, so the first two distractions stepped to the fore.  First, I volunteered to help with the Syrian refugee resettlement initiative under way in Saint John, trying to bring my organizational skills and experience to bear on a situation that was generally one step ahead of catastrophe at that point (children unattended on the roof of the hotel, a family with lice, three children that had to be hospitalized on arrival near death from starvation, unattended children in the hotel pool... you get the picture).  That meant driving into Saint John, an hour and a half lost to commuting every day.  It meant hours at home on my computer, poring over lists of volunteers... It brought relatively little contact with the Syrian families, a short-term job offer that I declined, and a sharp reminder about what life in the work force is like. 

The second distraction arose out of federal politics when the Trudeau government established a committee to review Senate nominations, having earlier announced that it will eventually appoint "ordinary Canadians" as senators.  I've always thought I'd make a damn good senator, not under the historic political patronage system of appointments because as a non-partisan, former public servant, I have zero credentials in the game of party politics.  But if you want public policy analysis and sober second thought, well!  I'm your gal.  So I promptly did the homework and yes, there are two New Brunswick Senate vacancies.  That led to a serious re-work of my CV and some deep thought about suitable personal attributes and experiences I have, the kind you don't put in a CV... some emails to a prominent New Brunswick Liberal politician (still unanswered)... some entertaining flights of fancy... and some sober second thought.  If I was finding a temporary volunteer gig... um, trying... how would I manage working to age 75 (or death, whichever came first) in a demanding public service position?  Where was an artistic practice supposed to fit in that scenario?

The third distraction was a more pleasurable one: a nine-day trip to Isla Mujeres in Mexico with my St. Martins friend, Kate.  It was a milestone event: at 65 years-old, this was my first international travel other than to the US.  Ahead of the flight, I was pinching myself: I'm going to Mexico? me? really?  It was lovely, about as benign as a first international trip could be.  When I got back home a week ago (ish), Kate's husband, Jim, joined her, leaving me to play Auntie to their dog, Chica, for the month of March.  Arguably, Chica is a fourth distraction, but not nearly as preoccupying as the first three were.

Chica catches some rays in my yard, March 6, 2016

So what is this blog post all about, really?  It's about avoidance.  It's about what I've been pre-occupying myself with in order to be too busy to make art.  Let's call a spade a spade, here.  I have been gifted with a studio space, a huge gift that most artists would crave, and yet I've spent hardly any time there since Christmas.  I feel a resistance within, without knowing what that's all about.  Artists need fallow periods at times, but this feels more cathartic than mere rest.  There's something I'm working through that has to do with finding my own voice as an artist.  It was telling that I had planned to take a sketch book with me to Mexico but "forgot" it.  I had a chuckle at my own expense over that one.

But I haven't been entirely idle: I got an urge to make a relief print, worked carefully on a drawing for it, and have started the carving.  It has been a way to avoid painting, which seems to be at the heart of the knot.  Having set aside painting at NSCAD in order to do a photography major, I lost touch with paint... literally, how paint feels at the end of a brush.  NSCAD wasn't going to teach me about the materiality of how to use paint, so I decided I could figure that out through other means after the degree.  Now, here I am, and for some reason I'm resisting the obvious next step which is to abandon all expectations and "play with paint" until I find a comfortable vernacular with it.  What is at the heart of the resistance?  Is it fear of failure?  Is paint the wrong medium for me?  I don't know; there's an itch, but I don't know yet how to scratch it.

I'm reading a book at the moment, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, both practicing artists.  This quote seems to sum up my present conundrum:
     Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and    contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward.  Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next.  Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.  This is not the Age of Faith, Truth and Certainty.

In other words, somewhere within myself I'm trying to reconcile the potential meaninglessness of making art (neither audience nor reward, nor any making-of-the-world-a-better-place) with the possibility it holds of being one of the most meaningful things I could ever do with my life.  

These are the closing paragraphs of the book:
      Today, more than it was however many years ago, art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently.  On so many different fronts.  For so little external reward.  Artists become veteran artists only by making peace not just with themselves, but with a huge range of issues.  You have to find your work all over again all the time, and to do that you have to give yourself maneuvering room on many fronts -- mental, physical, temporal.  Experience consists of being able to reoccupy useful space easily, instantly.
     In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy.  It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty.  And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

These are the issues that are at the centre of my resistance, avoidance and raising of distractions to keep them at bay.  No wonder I'm stalling; these aren't small matters.  My earlier life came with a built-in sense of meaningfulness and there were built-in rewards and recognition -- in the former case as prosaic as money and the latter case, as seemingly trivial as a specific job classification.  Those things are what the conventional work world gives you, none of which are to be sneezed at and to all of which I'm thoroughly conditioned after an adult lifetime in the work force.

Perhaps my younger art student buddies have it easier, not having been habituated to the norms of a "career" outside of the arts?

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Now, having distracted myself further for a couple of hours by writing this post, it's time to... put the next load of laundry on, check the wood stove, put clean sheets on the bed, make a batch of soup, take Chica for a walk...