On knowing when not to push

As I type this I have four small pieces of unfinished work waiting to be completed in order for them to be hung as part of an exhibition at the end of this week. The reasons they are unfinished are myriad and typical. Due to some major deadlines looming at work work (as opposed to home work) I won't be able to take any time away from the day job to complete them. Just one of the many joys of trying to run two careers simultaneously.

So the situation asks the following of me: do I pull a few all-nighters and get the work complete or do I bow down to circumstance and concede defeat in this case?

A complicated enough question to be sure but have I mentioned that I am a high functioning, controlling perfectionist?

I feel like I have been here many times before. It's the queasy feeling of being at the bottom of a steep hill and knowing that, before you can relax, there is a hike in front of you. I have this feeling when I wake up on a Monday and realise that alongside the day job, there are three classes to teach, two social engagements and an extra evening to work at the gallery for a preview. It's the feeling of being in a sorry mess entirely of my own making because I have said yes to too many things. And I say yes from the best possible hopeful excited place. A place that wants to cherish my friends, exhibit my work, support other artists and generally just have a lovely time. The thing is, these days there is always a hill and there is always a hike. I don't think it should be like that.

So, how am I supposed to intuitively know when to push and when to let go?

Because to me letting go feels like failing. It feels like flaking out. It feels like sorry and I'm not good enough. It feels like letting someone down. It feels like letting me down.

I think the answer to this might be in how I've phrased the first question- maybe it's not about bowing down to circumstances and conceding defeat. Maybe it's about committing to taking care of your self in spite of everything life throws at you and the stuff you throw at yourself.

What if instead letting go felt like the most glorious white space of nothing? What if it felt like honouring the body and its shouty protests and resting? What if I don't need to complete four new pieces of work because, hang on! I have plenty of work I can hang instead?! It doesn't have to be shiny, new and brilliant all the time.

What if instead it feels like Rach, it's okay because this isn't your only chance.

Because here is the thing: in the past, every time I pushed to achieve something it's because I believed that the opportunity to do so wouldn't come around again. And that maybe it had been a mistake for me to get even this opportunity in the first place so I had better grab it and make it count before they find out.

I believed that I was on some kind of trajectory and that if I paused, even for a second, I would simply drop out of orbit and find myself back to where I was five years ago. On my sofa, two stone heavier, pizza in one hand, wine in the other.

Todays' exercise in rewriting my (skewed, neurotic, scarcity complex addled) belief system is one of the first steps in learning to trust myself. To trust that I have my back and I can rely on my own internal HR department to let me know when I need to ease up and book some holiday. And getting to the weekend with a gigantic caffeine hangover because I pushed myself to finish some paintings is the quickest way to undermine that and prove otherwise.

So I am going to throw a little white space in to my week. Eat something delicious for dinner. Hang out at my desk and see if I can maybe complete one painting whilst watching Harry Potter. Wrap some old work ready to dispatch and have an early night, simply because I'm tired and I feel like it. And I trust myself.

The free-range artist

Christmas is over and I'm finally working on a few paintings. Today I finished one that has been languishing for well over six months. I also started another. That felt good. I did all this fuelled by double chocolate and raspberry brownies. I decided a couple of days ago that January would be the month I cut down on sugar. That lasted then.

I don't think I ever really liked the idea of having a pristine white studio space, shared with other hipsterish artists, seriously working away whilst we talked about gallery representation and listened to Autechre. I think I do much better working out of my living room, on my own, glass of cava just out of shot, Boromir getting shot by orcs on the TV in the background (and then dying beautifully) for what seems like the fifth time this Christmas. (Note to self, must find new box sets to watch whilst painting).

Across these two tables (one on loan from my brother, one from Ikea £14) are the collection of random and useful objects helping me work at the moment.

Candles, always.
Pile of Moleskine notebooks for journalling, notes, poetry etc
Pile of handmade paper.
Yellow A5 Finsbury Filofax (Xmas prezzie from mum and dad)
Nourishing reading matter.
Crime novel (January is all about crime fiction)
Brushes, paints etc
Feathers
Bright pink poster paint
Karma bubble bath bar from Lush (it smells amazing and every now and then I catch a whiff of it and just think mmmmm)
Knitted owl gloves made by mum. Slightly too small. They limit my hand movements somewhat but i am determined to break them in.
A little stuffed and stitched handmade mouse. Gifted to me by one of the tutors at work late last year when I was in the middle of a stress related meltdown.
Sharpie markers
Washi tape (a growing addiction)
Dirty paint water
Earphones
Course file for my classes
Pile of magazines inc County Living (even though I live in the middle of a large town) and The Simple Things. Both are essential for decent vision boarding and daydreaming about cosy fires, woodland walks, suppers that include all manner of rare and lovely foodstuffs and rugged yet sensitive blokes in fairisle jumpers.
Broken glass lampshade (cracked side facing the wall)

There. You can keep your sparsely furnished converted warehouses. This is all I need.

Goodbye paintbrushes?

I always find summer to be quite a strange time. My weekly classes have finished and I'm not teaching regularly again until the end of September- I have a couple of one day workshops but they are few and far between. I'm back to doing the day job but, at The Mill, we don't programme bands or shows throughout August as the theatre is under maintenance. Because of this the normal routine (as much as there is ever a normal routine) goes out of the window and we all sort of drift. And bicker. There is tidying and filing and, this summer, a manic preoccupation with income generation and expenditure reduction (the government doing the best it can to see off the creative arts in this country). In the meantime I have been getting my teeth into some new projects- some ambitious new paintings, repainting the flat and attempting to write that novel.

Yep, you did read that last part right. The novel.

When I was younger all I did was write and paint. It's pretty much all I do now. My 9 year old self used to hide in her bedroom and laboriously copy out page after page of the Wind in the Willows in grey exercise books. When I was 13 my next door neighbour gave me her old word processor. It took up the entire bedroom and looked a little bit like the computer Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. When you sent something to print it sounded like machine gun fire and took about 20 minutes to type out one page.  Somewhere in my parent's house there will be a file with a dozen or so stories about a misunderstood and awkward teenager. The heroines will all have alarmingly precocious names like Araminta or Thea.

Even as an adult I have journalled regularly from the first few dizzy weeks at art college to documenting the glorious, cinematic beginnings of a relationship and it's mundane and all-too-ordinary disintegration. There are stacks of cheap notebooks filled with the kind of obsessive longings normally reserved for teenagers, not apparently sane 32 year old adult education coordinators. But I want to write something a little more structured. Something with plots and characters and themes and a point to make somewhere. And, for all my flippancy about this, it disguises the fact that this is quite important to me and has been a secret wish for a long time. For the first time I have really started to appreciate the situation I find myself in. I am single, I have just enough wit and intelligence behind me to make a reasonable, if not exactly incendiary, stab at this. I have time on my hands and a room (a couple of rooms actually) of my own. I have no idea what's in store for me but this may be the only time in my life where I have access to this period of grace and stillness.

So, I have stock piled the Moleskines, the dark chocolate and a couple of helpful books (Stephen King's On Writing is fab, as is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg) and I have set my self some small and manageable goals. The rest is up to me.

Routine seed heads

A little bit of a surprise this one, acrylic paint not being part of my comfort zone, but there you go. Again, this is a class sample, showing how different collage textures work. There is fabric, sheet music and parts of a Henry James novel glued down under this painting of some fennel seed heads. We're making concertina sketchbooks in my sketchbooking class, a two week project based around some frosty, wintery imagery I have collected.

I find that with the nights drawing in and the days becoming chillier that the motivation is going. It's a real efffort just to drag myself into the studio to paint. I think i've become stuck in a bit of a rut recently as well and it has lead me to muse upon the nature of routine and my contradictory reactions to it, I feel slightly fraught when things suddenly change and I feel myself adrift but no one panics more than I to find myself in the middle of the never ending drudgery of work, classes, sleep, painting.

The Mill is having a craft fair in approximately one month and there is a call for work on the private rooms of a new cancer unit at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, so, time to get busy. I have started a painting for the open submission but it's really not going well. I have a large sheet of Bockingford watercolour paper which is usually lovely but the paint is not behaving as I would want it to. I will post photos tomorrow of this disaster. I get quite bloody minded when things like this happen, i'm inclined just to plod on until I can make it good!

Right, I think i'm going to give myslef an hour to read a book and then i'll have another bash- see if I can't make it into a decent painting. Miss Congeniality on tv tonight. Love it.