Flow: Yin and Yang (2026) 16″ x 40″ on canvas
It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart-a pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And What does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.
It is this internal force – this intimate interrupter – whose tracks I would follow. The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self – and does – is a darker and more curious matter.
–Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time from Upstream: Selected Essays, 2016
In recent weeks, my time here in the studio has been fractured by things other than the creative urge. It is a constant stream of distractions, both physical and mental. Physically, there are doctor appointments by the handful, radiation treatments, and caring for three once-feral studio cats who have become solely indoor cats in the past week after one was attacked by a stray cat outside the studio which led to a couple of vet visits. Then there are the regular maintenance chores that once felt like small tasks that have grown into overwhelming burdens, and all sorts of unforeseen interruptions that pop up in all our lives.
Mentally, I find myself fully distracted by these things along with the constant concern and worry about my health and how well my treatment is going as well as how I am going to navigate the coming months leading up to my June show at the Principle Gallery. When my regular menu of worries and concerns is factored in, my onboard overthinking mechanism is thrown into overdrive.
And when that happens, the creative process sputters and stalls out. That, in itself, is an added strain.
Thank god for the dexamethasone that I take before each of radiation treatments. It is a fairly powerful steroid that is meant to stave off inflammation from the radiation to my bones. It is also no doubt the source of my recent burst of giddy elation– an almost hypomania– that I wrote about here in recent days. It has helped greatly in keeping my anxieties at bay. I only have a couple of more doses to go so I am going to try to ride their effects for the next week or two, if possible.
The last few days have consisted of surrounding myself with the few new pieces I’ve managed to produce in recent times along with older pieces from various periods of my work from the past 20 or 25 years. Part of this is in trying to select work for an upcoming preview of my Principle Gallery show in American Art Collector magazine.
Plus, I am just trying to get an idea of how this show will be put together and how it might flow as a whole. I am trying to form a visible line of continuum through the work. This is probably why I settled on Flow as the title for the exhibit. It has been taxing but ultimately satisfying as I assemble and consider the individual pieces. Though I am distracted and not painting at the moment, it feels like I am accomplishing something.
Even if it is a small step, anything that takes me forward would be a win right now.
Even so, I feel good about things. Maybe it’s the steroids. I don’t know and I don’t care at the moment. Just trying to milk this good feeling for a while longer while trying to find that bit of solitude needed to create, as the poet Mary Oliver described in the passage above from her essay On Power and Time:
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart-a pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
The whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to. Love that line.
Certainty is an elusive creature in the best of times for me and the certainty that I find in my work seems even more difficult to locate right now. But it is still there, somewhere. I know that as a fact. Years of wrestling with this in various forms has taught me that.
I don’t know why I wrote this today. It feels all too much like a diary entry. But I did say I was going to be transparent on this process so maybe that’s the reason. Maybe I just felt like I had to air it out?
As always, I don’t know. Thanks for bearing with my rambling on the way I do lately. Much appreciated.
Here’s a song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It came on while I was writing and it felt like it was a response to a cue coming from my mind. It is Ray LaMontaigne and his The Way Things Are. The verse below struck me as I considered this post and the new painting at the top, Flow: Yin and Yang :
Lay me down beside that stream a-flowing
Lay me down under that moon a-glowing
That’s the way things are (the way things are)
That’s the way they really are (the way things are)
Now, get out of here, you’re distracting the hell out of me…
Redtree Times 