more thoughts
Hard to not feel better when dancing with a toddler in puffballs 🙂
A little over a year ago, not long after my daughter was born, I was seized by a terrible fear of wasting time. Suddenly every moment I had (not filled meeting the needs of my family) that wasn’t used for art felt like a painful loss of time. I found myself deeply regretting the previous year and a half I spent more focused on other work besides my own art growth. Realizing now that I had so little time every moment builds on itself to something greater and much much bigger in the end.
Yesterday, as I handed my crying 18month old to the sitter and shifted into the studio I had to remind
myself of this feeling and vow. I instead was seized by a deep melancholy and questioning of my pursuit of art-making. Why am I so single-mindedly focused something that does not support our family (actually losing $- bc I pay for a sitter), takes me away from my children, and takes an enormous amount of my emotional energy? I think that my family hopes/assumes after a period of time there will be more $$ to be made. However, working towards that as an artist is no guarantee of anything. Of course I have goals/ideas about when I would like to show more, etc… but suddenly it all seems so hopeless.
I really don’t have a solid answer to this question for myself- though I believe the answer lies somewhere in the emotion I was so overwhelmed with last year. There is an intense need to resolve something within myself and communicate something I cannot communicate in any other fashion that fuels such a desire and drive.
I do shift sometimes and make crafty items for fun. Every time I do this someone makes a comment at how easily I could sell what I just made. If it was money, than of course this is what I would be doing (and just like I used to be an LMT as my “day-job”, I just might need to do this as well someday). Yet after I ponder this for a little bit, I always end up back in the studio working slowly on whatever abstract piece I am trying to resolve. I find myself once again jealously guarding my art-time lest it be taken over by any other endeavors.
There have been times where I have either chosen out of a sense of responsibility or been unable to make art. I remember these times so clearly as being haunted by a constant longing of something unfulfilled. Nothing could seem to cancel out this emotion.
Without continuing to ramble much further since this is an ongoing question- I did come to the conclusion for now that while I don’t have the answer to what it is I am trying to discover, the temporary answer lies in the process itself.
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Jayne Peña Art 