May 17, 2015
It is re-focus time in the studio. I have all weekend for this – just one little gig for an hour today, then back at it.
I think of studio as a map both for and of my mind. It’s a container for schedule; a flexible structure that can be altered according to the needs of each project. Currently, it’s a mess – the detritus from several months of steady-work-no-break is all around. I’ve been gifted some tools and supplies, materials and media from my father who is packing up his own studio for a big move – they have yet to find their functional place. Other materials have never had functional space, and languish invisible in the back of an old filing cabinet drawer…
This will not do. It begs a re-think, a clearing out, a clarification.
I love the way this draws me inexorably to a hunt for passions, new or old. Arrows are questions, propelled by a bow of necessity: what am I drawn to? How and whom will these ideas serve?.
I discover I’m feeling compelled to work this out on paper as I did when I was 15, with media I’ve not used for years…
I clear the boards, make a pile for burning. Sweep and clean the floor, listening.
Sacred space certainly, but this place is no shrine. It’s a factory inside the factory my Great-Grandfather built.
Factories run on schedule. Which reminds me of something Annie Dillard wrote,
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. … It is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.