I need about 4 lifetimes…or maybe a magician or even an efficiency coach.
Oh, the brimming pot of ideas.
It seems like the ideas are always coming in…like a meteor shower blasting through Earth’s atmosphere…and they often meet the same fate as those members of a meteor shower. Catching flame and dissipating from existence…or being lost in the Purgatory of surface area yet to be tread. If a pen and paper is not handy to scribble down the light bulb moments, the impending demise and lack of realization is almost a sure fate. If there is paper, it gets added to the multitude of ‘solid plans’ awaiting for my able and distracted fingers to lift into life. Each new idea might as well come with the sign, “get in line”.
Currently, I have several solid painting series up there in the old magic attic, aka my brain. As in seriously, full-fledged large-scale multiple painting series with imagery and titles and the promise of satisfaction if I ever make them real. They’re like imaginary Pinocchios sitting on the shelves of my mind, saying, “I want to be real!”
There’s a series called Tales from the Start, about the surreal trips of labor complete with text and tales from real mothers. There’s Versus, which pairs up a series of diptychs showing catastrophes man made and nature made, before and after. There’s Mother and Child, conceived today…my first series that promises to air out some humor, documenting the moments and follies with my own children, with conceptions titled, for example, “Checking my Email” and “Going to the Bathroom” with corresponding scenes of, respectively, my beautiful children having squeezed out an entire tube of toothpaste onto the floor and walls of the bathroom; and getting into my paint that I had walked away from to relieve myself and covering themselves and my canvas in it.
There’s also Sense of Place…first series of mostly just landscapes with perhaps imposed photographs of myself at various ages implanted into the scenes. And Lost in Translation, about the various juxtaposed images that appear in my brain yet don’t seem to offer a clear narrative…that one actually has 1 1/2 members living in the real world.
It’s quite a tall order and there are quite a lot of logistics and competing elements with the whole thing. These questions and reasons are totally legitimate, i.e. where do I make and store 20+ large-scale paintings (and yes they have to be big because if they’re not, I’m not interested)? How much time can I devote to it? What can I shuffle to make room in my life to make it happen? There’s the fact that I’ve got two kids and just started grad school. That there’s always some babe or beast’s mouth to feed (or butt to wipe or clothes to launder). That there’s always supplies to fetch, communications to be made, dreams to dream, responsibilities to answer. These are all good reasons and yet they still sort of feel like excuses. I get a lot done…so why can’t these ideas get done?
Then there’s the shiftiness that is me…I’ve got a grand plan and an articulate map…to which I keep creating multiple paths to ridiculous summits. Oh sure, get your M.A. now, get your MFA, too, someday. Maybe you should be a midwife. Maybe you should shut up and stick to the teaching plan. Maybe you should do photography. Maybe you should write a book. Maybe you should be a nurse. Maybe you missed your calling and should have been a lawyer. No, wait, you know what you’re really into,? Space…science…you should just go for it and satisfy that analytic turn and study astronomy and physics. Don’t be ridiculous, answer your true self and effing paint! Oh hello…don’t you have some babes to nurture?
Perhaps I sound neurotic. I probably am a little, though, truly I am a pretty steady sailing ship.
All these ideas and creative energies…confounded and potentially enriched by practical efforts, accomplishments and goals. I’m at the age when I’m wondering if I should buy a house…a cheap one that I could build up and make my own. However, that kind of puts a damper, or at least a potential hurdle, into the idea of answering the burning question of…do I want to stay in Missouri? The mountains, Mountains, Gandalf! There are good things here, though… Oh, what to do!?
These wheels and gears of multitude are not lacking. There are times when my head is a convoluted bloated goat and other times when the trust of the natural evolution and idea of everything falling into exactly where it needs to be is present and strong. It is probably this teetering between these torrid and sound waters that keeps me clicking in a somewhat forward direction…though when competing with time (this may well be the dreaded midlife crisis), it seems my forward direction can never keep up.
Alright, breathe, lassie…
Lasagna is done.
thisisntpainting 