A miracle happened this week

A miracle happened this week.  For the last couple of months, I’d been planning to spend a substantial time in my studio.  This would normally mean that I’d be unused to my own rhythm but the timing was perfect and I made work that works. I was productive.

Now I know that productive is also the periods where I play QuadroPop on my phone and linger by the sink hoping to bump into someone less wanting to work than me. But actually productive, the sort that makes you smile and excited to wake up in the morning, is working. 

So I have realised the three keys to this flush of excitement, which obviously I’ll never to be able to recapture.  Firstly, huge quantities of stuff in my studio so that at times I can barely move, helps.  There’s something in the odd and formless bin bags and boxes that gets me going.  Secondly, don’t look at any art.  I spent the week away just playing without intent and without wondering or thinking about meaning.

And thirdly do something that doesn’t work out.  The perspective drawings that I’ve spent the last few months on did not come out at all like I anticapated.  I came to it thinking about languages for looking and representation of space but what I made this week was about line and the discipline of drawing itself. 

So basically, the opposite of my life.  My studio is usually painfully tidy, I seem to spend all my time either talking about art or making it, which I spend endless amounts of time thinking about.

At times like this I do feel that this art lark is a spontaneous act that is joyful.   Yes, I’m at the beginning of whatever this is, which is the master key, but after the last few weeks of endings, a beginning is a miracle.