Tag: notes on practice

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Creativity requires a void. There has to be something missing for us to want to see something new. When life is two replete, where there is no blank wall, no empty space, the urge to make anew flags and ultimately stops.

Early on in your career, you’ve made no mark on the world, it all feels blank, awaiting your voice. As time goes on it can feel crowded, choked with all too much stuff, or a comfortable, affirming mirror. Neither possibility leads to working.

The abundance of infostractions dumped in my lap by my computer keeps me from feeling what I need to be working towards in the studio. Click by click I move away from the unquiet thoughts of my own lack that prod my arm to move the pen across the page. I know so much about so many things that ungraspable, shifting bits. Why do I like to see where a show of mine is going to happen? So that I can begin to play with that blank wall in my mind. It’s something to push against, so cozy up to or to reveal in an unexpected configuration. I have to make that something happen in my workspace if I hope to get anything done. I need to see a box to put the thing in.

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…and for the first time in my life, my show is basically done: the work is finished except for a couple of minor things, and I just spent the afternoon at the gallery hanging it all. There is something unnerving about that fact.

Things are not completely installed: the gallery will need to use the space for a private showing of something for a client this coming week, so they will document the position of everything, take it down and then I will go back in and do the final hanging, and there are a couple of things at the framer or in transit from other places, but we know where everything is going on the walls and it will be the matter of a couple of hours work to get it all in its final position.

But those of you who have been through this with me before (waltzingtree, girlfagpnw) know that in every other instance I am running around assembling works up until the very last minute. I’ve always used the deadline of a show as the way to bring works to completion. This time, I worked in a completely different way.