I drafted the paragraphs below weeks ago, and found I only had to make minor adjustments.

I thought I had something new to say, but rereading the last two posts I see I already said most of it.  If anything has changed, it's my growing detachment from art in a gallery space.  Or maybe art in any location that highlights the gulf between those who participate and those who don't.

My teaching feels more pressing, more gratifying, more of a contribution.  Visibility is a (and maybe the) key word here, and links the teaching I'm drawn to with the art I (might) make (and where it might go or what it might do and for whom).  Impact.

It is also about students' visibility in a brutally tough time. The compassion I can show those who are suffering is keeping me connected to the world.

The external world and the internal me have become cross-currents, each directing me toward a certain kind of work.  It's a shift from the private toward the public.  It's my lesser interest in studio work (that I'm not compelled to make and no one may ever see) and my greater interest in taking photos.  The immediacy of that is gratifying, both in making each picture and in sending it into the world.

I see people crumbling, even as we now have reason to be hopeful.  Exhaustion seems embedded in me.

Follow-up July 28:  Same

Yesterday I inflated enough by 4.30 to grocery shop. The sun was out briefly and the spring-ish cold felt good. I also dropped a shirt at my dry cleaner, which I visit maybe twice a year. (I don't dry clean and I don't iron.)  I walked in and felt like I was the owner's long-lost friend; I got and returned a very large and gleeful greeting, realizing that my appearance after a year-plus must be a sign of life and normalcy we all desperately need.  I'm certainly not a revenue stream.  She is not a very good seamstress but I have a coat I love that needs relining and will offer the work to her anyway.  An Asian-owned, local business trumps a stranger no matter how skilled.

Throughout this year, my pattern has been one to two crashes a week:  days where I'm energetically immobilized and sleep as much as possible.  (I can sleep a lot.)  While yesterday's near-paralysis was familiar, I realized late in the day that I had not had a crash in well over a week.  That is a stretch of more productive time to be grateful for, for schoolwork anyway.

Maybe there is a creative logic to my low interest in my studio work - but my dismissal of new ways to work is self-blockage.  I came to value the photo/IG work after several months, and am now pursuing it as much as letting it find me.  But I miss working with my hands in the studio, and am not energized by the work underway on my tables and walls. This WIP has come along a bit since this photo (three finished columns and a fourth started), but I can't summon interest in continuing.

And that's fine ... I always circle back ... but in the meantime I'm wanting something fresh to focus me.  Actually, to compel me.  Am I available to be compelled toward anything?

Covid Lockdown

It's been almost a year since I wrote here; I just changed the copyright date from 2018 to 2021.  I reread a little, including Anne Truitt's words on the aging body.  Little has changed.  My energy comes but mostly goes; ideas form but motivation doesn't form behind them.  I have to convince myself there is a point to doing much of anything.  I am keeping up with schoolwork, for practical but also personal reasons:  it makes me visible in the world and has an impact on people I care about.

But I don't care much about myself, privately.  I can barely sustain any worthwhile activity, and that's if I can start at all - whether it's to work in the studio or to read something more enriching than the news or to reach out for conversation.  I sleep a lot, self-medicate more than I like, and feel numb and blank.  The impulse to write here (as opposed to one of my several journals) has actually stuck for a couple of days, and I get it:  it is available to others even if no one sees it.  And its public-ness binds me to being clear and complete in ways I can sidestep in private.  My thinking is under more pressure to resolve to something, and words are the right material.

Many of the artists in my community find solace in their work, or a new sense of purpose.  I feel a futility.  I can understand that intellectually, but it leaves me without a way to summon or focus my creative work.  Again this makes practical sense, but it overlaps with the loss of energy related to aging, and I feel defeated and worried that I will ever feel like myself again.

Picture-taking and Instagram have become my primary studio practice - a way to process the shocks of the last year, to be out of the house with a sense of purpose, and to make work that is immediately visible to the world.  When I realized this I was relieved not to be as dead-in-the-water as I felt, but I still fault myself for not making "real" work in the studio.  I should get off my own back and not sabotage a creative stream that has been working.