Out, Damned Spot! Out, I say!

This is the time of year when it's pretty hard to stay on course in the studio. There are just too many things happening in the outside world - parties, shopping, grant applications, studio visits and other distractions. I am feeling all that interference with the normal course of non-events in my private world, and to top it off, I am moving into a different kind of work.

Having just completed two large works in the Running Stitch series, my mind's eye is sort of fixated on that mode. I've been making notes and sketches for future projects and want to get started on them for the solo show I have coming up in February. But, I'm also interested in submitting works to Supria Karmakar's call for submissions for The Wax Book, a juried exhibition at Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro to be shown during the Sixth International Encaustic Conference in June.

Back in the 1990s I made a lot of artist's books - and pretty much drove myself crazy, by the way. My personality is not one that cleaves to the neat and tidy, plan-ahead world in which I made my artist's books. I'm a little more rough and ready and felt I was boxing myself in. I'm a lot more comfortable with either a paintbrush or a hammer in hand, so I gave up artist's books and went back to the messy, hands-on world of painting. (Here are some images of books I made in the 1990s - complicated, all handwritten and I made them in small editions of four or six books the same. Ugh!) (click images to see larger)

Visiting Nature - open

Beach Music - open

On The Road - open midway

The fact is that I could just have changed the type of artist's book I made and not gone for the intricate dimensional pieces I was doing, but when I'm done with something, I'm flat-out done - that is, until I get back to it at a later date.

So, this past week has been a bust in the studio. Between visitors, working, shopping, driving to Boston and partying, I barely got in there. Today I finally came face to face with myself and started trying to come up with some ideas. I couldn't make my usual mess because I'm having visitors on Monday, so that meant I couldn't do what I usually do - pull everything out and try some things. Coming up with ideas under pressure is probably my least favorite part of being an artist. I just get squirmy and do anything to avoid that blank spot between my ears - email, Facebook, magazines, newspapers, trips to the trashroom, anything, anything to get me out of that nasty blank spot. Today I even tried sitting quietly in my chair and visualizing something I would like to see but that didn't work either.

Finally my eye lit on three objects that I've had kicking around the studio for a couple of months and have planned to use one of these days. I brought them to my table and started fooling around with them. Wonder of wonders, I got ideas (or "idears" as I would say)! I believe I have a solution for my book making problem! (In fact, three solutions.) As soon as I had a few preliminary plans in mind, I got the hell out of there before I acted too soon and screwed things up.

No, I'm not going to tell. You'll just have to wait and see - along with me.