In August of 2006, I vowed to go back to the studio, sixteen (!) years after having lost nearly all creative momentum in the wake of the First Gulf War in 1990 and Richard's descent into the later stages of alcoholism. The earliest manifestation of the above scratchboard drawing was the result. A year later in August of 2007, I brought that scratchboard out, made a few more marks on it and dated it. In 2008, four months after Richard died, I brought it out, made a few more marks and dated it again and wrote, "This isn't working, is it?"
A few weeks ago, I came across the scratchboard again and scanned it with my new Canon printer/scanner, bought with the thought that it is time to pick up where I left off in the series of black and white drawings that ended a few months before Richard's death, with this moonlit image of Scudder Pond:
Today I have my first cold in years, along with a renewed desire to get back to work in the studio again in whatever form that takes.
It is just occurring to me that since December of 2006, this blog has been my studio. I have been working creatively and steadily, although not in the form I envisioned in August of 2006.
Interesting that as I was re-watching "Vietnam, Long Time Coming" yesterday, someone from Ho Chi Minh City visited my blog, and that yesterday I had about twice as many visitors to my blog.
Time heals, after all--although the clock that marks that kind of time has no hands.
(Suze Rotolo, from A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties):
One of the great features of studio life is the capacity for renewal. Daily love manifests itself and is a fairly reliable prod. Some projects can be measured in no time at all. Sometimes three or four projects can be performed and completed in a single day. Other projects progress over days or weeks, dependent on the uncanny sleep-work that lies between. “Love does not just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. (Ursula K. LeGuin):
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.”
(Marc Chagall):
Still, the joyful insists on getting a word in.
(R. L. Bourges):
A gift of love from Richard from January 2008, three months before he died, an artist to the end:
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