Fellow artists- do you ever get so busy and so wrapped up in all the other things in your life that you suddenly realize that you haven’t actually made any art at all for a very long time? And then you realize that that fact is precisely the reason you’re feeling just slightly off, a little bit not quite right. I had one of these moments last week.
I was away on vacation for two weeks in November. I made a little scrapbook of receipts and tickets and such, and I took a really excessive quantity of photos, so it’s not like I was totally uncreative during that period. But it’s not the same as spending a whole evening in the studio, just playing and exploring and having fun. I thought I might do some drawing while on vacation, but just felt uninspired to do so. (This is of course related to my general uninterest in drawing, as exemplified by my failed Daily Drawing project).
Even the couple of weeks before the trip I didn’t really make much art at all, since I was so busy doing trip-planning stuff, researching things online, mapping out routes, etc. Then when I got back from the trip I had to hustle to finish a big batch of necklaces to sell at holiday craft shows. I love making the necklaces of course, but aside from deciding on the images, it’s a lot of boring production work (gluing, filing, painting, assembling chains and clasps and bails).
And then I got a whole bunch of freelance design projects to work on. I enjoy doing design work (and am extremely grateful for the extra income), but again, it’s a different kind of thing than working on my own projects. And then it got to be holiday season. I love making gifts for people, and I have a tendency to settle on overly-ambitious projects. This years’ project is something I really wanted to do last year but didn’t have enough time due to school. It’s all complete now and turned out quite well, but it ate up a lot of time.
By the end of last week I had settled into some sort of feeling of malaise, of feeling like there wasn’t enough time to get everything done, of feeling like I was being propelled through my life faster than I would really like, and that life was full of a series of small but irritating things gone wrong like my credit card number being stolen from somewhere online, and my favorite pair of shoes falling apart, and one of the gift projects turning out really badly, and having a cavity filled, and other little ordinary things that happen but which seemed to be piling up into a huge drift of Bad Things. I was getting that weird Groundhog Day feeling of waking up to the same day repeatedly. I hate that. And things have been busy at my job too, and when I wasn’t working on some sort of non-art project in the evenings and weekends I was just tired and would end up either wasting time online or lying on the sofa and reading and inevitably dozing off after a while. Life is too short to be taking naps most evenings when you work fulltime and you need your evenings for your own creative work.
I finally forced myself to just drop everything one evening and sit down and just work on some of my fun art projects. Nothing for a sale, no design work, no computer, no holiday gift projects. I decided to work on some of the collaborative book projects for a while. And it was just amazing how happy I felt, sitting there on the floor, painting and collaging. I don’t know if it’s a blessing that something so simple makes me happy, or a curse that it’s something I seem to NEED to be happy. I think it’s something about getting out of my own head, focusing on the materials and the process and getting into the flow and letting things happen and reacting to things that happen and going in new directions that I love. I think I spent no more than two or three hours working on these books, but it made such a huge different in how I felt. I don’t think I can even do a good job of explaining it.
December is always a hectic and stressful month. I’m pretty minimal about the holidays, except for the elaborate gift projects. I don’t decorate, I don’t bake. I don’t go to the mall (I once quit a mall job right before Christmas because I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with it! Hooray for online shopping!). But this happens every year- I settle into this bad feeling that is really hard to shake. And I really think it’s because I get distracted from spending enough time on my own artwork. December is also an introspective month for me- as the new year approaches I like to think back over the past year and think about what to do differently in the new year. It seems clear that I need to think more carefully about how much time I spend on making art, and how to better fit that into my life and all the other things I need and want to do. But I think I’ve gone on enough here and some ideas about next year are a separate post entirely!
