everyday life

the studio inside, a discovery

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This morning, at long last after the wild month of June, I recovered my sense of myself and the poetics of my year (my explorations of the poetics of existence and what this means for me will have to wait til another time). It was a moment of delight. I found my other self, the one that I had been severed from by difficulty, demands and distress.

What was it that made me see into it? I am not quite sure but it was something about my July clearing and it made me look back to the last large event in my life (moving home, another longer story). Then I noticed that it was exactly nine months since this moment, a period of time which always speaks to me in a deep way, and lo and behold, yes indeed, as I started to map the timelines of this season, insights and memories emerged that I had completely forgotten and the poetic significance they have in my story suddenly re-emerged.

Perhaps they are not linked but in close proximity to this I made my discovery: There were rhythms in even my short studio week that made a path into my creativity. And what I noticed this morning is that, while the physical studio is not longer mine, and the studio inside is (as I noticed yesterday) somewhat vulnerable, there is this studio of the rhythm.

Perhaps I had already felt this lurking, but to truly alight on it felt splendid. And quickly I recognised: I can live the rhythms of the studio day into my no-studio day, and somehow I will have created some room of my own within the wilds of existence.

Of course I am not so naive as to think a studio rhythm will replicate entirely the emphatic (and political) reality of material space, but there is something in it, and I know it is going to make a space for something. A pathway to and shelter for the studio inside.

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.

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.