There wasn’t much of a break after getting back from last Friday’s opening of my show, Native Voice, at the Principle Gallery, which hangs there until July 6th. No, there was another deadline waiting for me when I returned to the studio: the July 17 opening of my annual show at the West End Gallery, this year titled Home+Land. The last week has seen me fall right back into the groove that was formed in prepping for the Principle Gallery show.
This is not an unusual pattern. This is the 13th year that my West End show has began right on the heels of my Principle Gallery show and in that time I have developed a way of coping with the tight schedule: heavy drinking. Not really but there are days sometimes that feel like that might not be such a bad idea, especially those ones where the creative thread seems to disappear briefly and a bit of panic rises in me. And believe me, that does happen from time to time.
Yesterday, for example. I had finished a new painting ( the one at the top) and was still in that piece in my mind and not ready to move on quite yet. I checked out my calendar to see where I was in relation to the opening and it just seemed, in that moment when my mind was still not yet moving on to the next task, that there was so much to do and so little time in which to complete it. A horrible ball of tension built within me and I found myself paralyzed with panic for a while. My mind just stalled with that calendar imposed on it. I paced around the studio for quite a while, trying to gain footing and move past this.
I knew that I could and that I would. The experience of having been through this so many times before calms those nerves and lets me keep my eyes on what is in front of me rather than fretting about what is ahead. And that is the secret to overcoming the pressure of a deadline such as this– staying focused in the moment. Clearing the mind of worries about things that may or may not occur in the future and immersing yourself in the task at hand. And luckily for me the task that I normally face is one, by its very nature, that normally calms my anxieties.
So I moved immediately to the paint and within minutes of the first brushstroke the anxiety seemed to ease. The mind cleared. The calendar seemed trivial and distant. All I saw was the scene that began to take shape in front of me and all of my thoughts were simple reactions to what I was doing on the canvas.
All was well again.
That being said, there is still much to do for the upcoming show and I am sure there will more incidents like yesterday in the next month. But I am prepared and the show thus far looks and feels very good to me, which in itself is a calming agent. I just thought I would give you an inside look at one of the parts of the process that sometimes gets swept under the rug– you don’t see it but it’s often there underneath the surface.
Redtree Times 