creativity

the studio inside, reflections

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In the morning I wrote about the studio inside and afterwards I went to play the piano downstairs (in my neighbour’s empty apartment) and I could feel it, a cavernous beautiful space, brimming with beauty and wholeness and a kind of truth.

I will live my summer from this feeling, I vowed to myself.

Then I went to help a friend move house, caught up on work matters neglected while I was busy and ill, arranged things, visited the still-packing friend, keeping her company while I dealt with personal emails, sent birthday cards to people (late) and wrote thank you notes and thinking of yous to friends in turbulence.

It is very much easier to respect the reality of the studio outside compared to the studio inside, I notice. I become invisible to myself and then my reality slides in a direction that is at odds with my true feelings.

Yet I feel an insistence that something is alive and important that I must tend.

It requires gentleness and care. Faced with looming to-do lists, it goes to ground and takes me time to coax it back into the open. I would strengthen my resolve but the very attempt at self-mastery likewise deters this tenderness from appearing.

I need to allow for the reorientation of my being.

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.

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.

disturbance

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And then, not quite the moment I’d mentioned the word ‘rhythm’ but not long after, the pattern has been disturbed. I forgot to bring my journal home from the studio, disrupting my normal writing time first thing in the morning. Then I realised that my carefully-herded into a less obstructive timeslot client meeting now required a fully powered laptop, but that that the ageing battery was at 73% and could not be relied on to last. Rushing over to the studio where the charger had been left meant that there was no time to play the piano before I left home.

And so on and so on..

In the wider scheme of things these minor turbulences are, of course, negligible. But I cannot live my creative nature patrolled by the legitimacy police. My creative work is to try to shimmy myself into the tiny cracks of the most vulnerable, neglected places of (my) being. That process is easily disrupted and I cannot help but be protective of it. A luxury, one might remark, and yes, in the context of what is going on around us that luxury is stark. But in the context of my own story it’s not quite so indulgent as that term implies, and perhaps if our world spent a little bit more time and care on its vulnerable places we might sleep easier.

So then, disturbance (category: small, agreed). As the etmology unveils, it is disorder, grief, agitation, turmoil, bewilderment, muddying, stagnation.

In the lightness of this season though, the disturbance, while apparent, is less of a suffering. In one of my favourite television programmes, the idea of ‘stirring up the waters’ is seen as having value, of offering a way out of weary patterns.

Has my rhythm already become a confinement?

Unknown.

I traversed all the minor disturbances, and now I am back in a more or less calm serenity. Or do I delude myself? I am awaiting a message and that message may have power to truly disrupt me, so then, yes, perhaps I am serene, but I am also aware of something stirring the nature of this calm existence, something beyond my reach and beyond my control.

And I wonder what it has to offer?