story

the studio inside

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The week long residency in the heavenly studio came to an end. I cleaned, tidied and locked up.

I went to the Watercolour Museum on a pilgrimage and I was too tired to relish it (although I had enough energy to be annoyed by patriarchal posturing and no women’s voices.)

I came home wondering:

What next?

My weekend has been full of sweet social moments, a hiatus of grace.

But something in me is alive. How do I make space to create, what should be the rhythm, what happens in the hush. I have business work to do, but a distaste for harshness and discipline, which in my studio week, I escaped.

At the end of the week I was so tired I felt like perhaps the one week’s output had been enough for a whole summer.

But it hadn’t.

There is something in me and its precious and needs to be tended.

Yes, there are canyons of chores awaiting my attention, but there is something more… an insistence.

And a thought occurs to me:

Maybe the time in the studio was renovating

the studio inside?

unfinished

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It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Central European Summer Time.

I have had a beautiful time in the studio today, the last day, but it feels unfinished.

My contemplations of two more large works, finishing triumphantly and emphatically, have not materialised. Maybe I should blame the hush?

A visitor came to see my work and she stayed longer than I expected. Longer in a good way, but it meant that my last hours are curtailed.

Perhaps I would not have painted triumphant works anyway.

There is always a pull in me to pour everything out to the last drop, to the death.

But what happens when it’s a moment for birth?

I am swooshing a bit in my own uncertainty, in my own interrupted cadence.

I think this is where I am meant to be.

So then I will start to clear up.

divenire

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Something exciting happened this morning.

If you have been following the unfolding of this week in the studio you will know that I have been making artistic works and poetry to the sound of my playing the piano piece ‘divenire’ by Ludvico Einaudi. In a way it was a little surprising that I was drawn to this particular piece. It’s not the one I know the best, nor have practised the most, and after a long absence I might have expected myself to play the piece that sounded most polished, especially once I’d decided to record it.

But somehow I wanted to play this particular piece.

Called ‘Divenire’, which means becoming – all kinds of becoming.

In a way this title has just been hovering as a kind of ‘nice motif’ even though usually I am very sensitive to the poetics of existence. But in a way too it was just obvious and normal and did not require too much attention. I was also somewhat perplexed about the whole matter because I actually could not play the whole piece; it had a middle bit that I had never mastered nor really tried to investigate, partly because it looked a bit intimidating with dotted notes and trills.

Then two days ago the neighbour whose piano I am borrowing was back in her apartment so I could not play it. Then yesterday I had an unexpected client call in the morning so again my playing rhythm was disturbed.

Yesterday was a long and tiring day but at the end of it I managed to coax myself back into the downstairs apartment to at least a bit play the piano. I have recognised it as a place on which I must insist. Something is there.

And, perhaps encouraged by the peace of the hush that descended (and about which I have just written), I found myself looking into this missing section. I was familiar with listening to the piece; and I loved it – perhaps it was not really so difficult, so I pondered.

I tried a bit, and was astonished… it turned out that it was as if somehow my fingers had had ears of their own and knew the tune without me being aware of it.

But both the fingers and myself stopped short at the dotted notes. Also this bit involved playing two regular notes on one hand at the same time as three regular notes on the others; again, intimidation.

I moved on to another piece, and then a friend texted and I gave up for the evening, but already something had shifted. I had found encouragement in my fingers and their apparent readiness for the work.

So this morning, early before my studio arrival, back I went to play.

And something marvellous is happening. My fingers and self have found their way to traverse, at least almost traverse, the middle section of the piece. They have not quite quite made it without falling yet but soon they will, perhaps tonight.

All week my poetics look-out has been on already alert, calling to me about this piece. But I did not want to get distracted, and I’m wary of the risk of false conclusions and too-small stories.

But today as I dwelled within the piece and my own sudden ability to make it from one side to the other (almost!) I felt a deep delight. Something is happening in me in this week and although I still don’t know what it is, it is deep and it is light.

hushed

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I was in two minds about whether to write this writing first, or the other one, which I will soon also write and post, but this came first and it felt like it deserved its place.

A hush really descended with the painting and poem that arrived called hush.

‘A hush descended’ – an evocative phrase to which I have never given a moment of serious attention, and all of a sudden the precision of the image is startling, as are the implicit poetics. ‘Descended from where’, I have literally never asked, despite encountering this reality many times.

From wherever it was previously, it descended. Perhaps it also was where it was previously, like a mist.

And it descended on to me, into me, a saturating silence, and had an effect, as to order all the atoms of my being in a peaceful direction, like the magnetic field on iron filings.

Mysteriously this is accompanied by a kind of paralysis of thought, but not an alarming one. Instead of making an effort to dig deep, uncover, investigate, tease out, they drift. A freedom, a mystifying intertwinement of the heights and the depth, and me.

And here I am in that hush and a kind of new beauty feels like it is unfolding.

breath, breathless

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stumble through the doorway
running, it seems I was
though now the old reality
seems distant, though yesterday

catch a breath
a gasp slow motion
exhalation, panic,
gulp another moment
sigh, disordered in
my being,
restless still

racing rat, fraught
thought, fought,
forlåt, what was that?
a tale, though how
you chased it

welcome
you are my guest
arrive, draw in deep,
what’s mine is yours
inhale hopefuless and wonder

my sighs pursue me,
echo the space alarmed
what happened to you?
life

a sweetness as a breeze
rose, orange blossom, peony,
fresh rain on gentled grass
far seas

I am arriving
I am born alive

Note: This is from the studio series inspired by paintings in my studio. The later paintings were written to the tune Divenire by Ludvico Einaudi. I can no longer remember if this one was. This is painted in Rose Madder, Permanent Rose, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange (all Windsor and Newton Professional) and Light Gold (Rembrandt). In my work these specific orange and yellow paints are indicative of the presence of a kind of fire, an element of the warrior nature. This first painting is the only one to use the fire colours. As if the arrival in the studio was a last breath of fire before the inhale and exhale of a more tender and touching reality.