A Room of One's Own

We chatted in last Monday's group about the frustration of not having a space to make in. I always bang on about sitting every morning with your cup of tea and drawing it for a regular exercise in limbering up but it's not enough if you're itching to really get into something.  It needs space and time and ideally to be left and then returned to and this doesn't work on the kitchen table where you have to clear up each time you've managed to grab five minutes to 'create'. 

I'm without a studio at the moment and I haven't been making anything satisfying for ages. I've been busy setting up courses and trying to grow The Drawing Board as a thing and I haven't been going 'in' at all. The thing is, it doesn't just mean I feel a bit off because I'm not really connecting with my own art it also means I'm not as good a teacher because I'm not exploring and evolving in the same way.

This is one of my more recent pieces and it was so good to connect with materials again. I have a practice that often gets way into the conceptual and it's heady and as much as I love it I need the process of letting something just emerge through the material. They are very different ways of working but they feed each other. Eva Hesse was very much a material process artist and conversely Sol Lewitt was ideational, conceptual. I love them both.

Accepting your own process and understanding it can be a great grounding for your practice but also for your being. It even reaches into self forgiveness and that great feeling of letting go of any grasping need to be something else. We all have it in us to be these fantastic beings. Our own knowledge is rich with how to be fulfilled and it does seem to begin with acceptance. We owe it to ourselves to make the space and time to do this, even if it does mean creating a crazy mess in the house!  It's worth it. Put some music on, get the paints out and re-use some old paper and get going, just make some marks and see where they take you.