When walking I wonder and lately I've been wondering a lot. I have been keeping busy and taking on lots of responsibility and thus drawing less. Today I even left my sketchbook home. No big thing for a normal kid, but I'm a sketchbook clutcher. Not just my security blanket, these books are places I can be sure to be creative. So if I don't draw everyday do I still add to the creative well and make my work stronger somehow and how do I know if I am not working much. Am I becoming too day job and too little artist? And for what?

It's pace: I've been waking up at 6:30, getting to work at 7:30, lightly lunching at 1:30, stepping away from my desk at 5 to look at houses, gulp dinner and get back for clay class at 6:30, which ends at 9:30 so I can get to bed by 11. It's a breakneck pace that is truly temporary and much self-imposed.

It's place: The environment I work in is enormously creative but it completely lacks privacy, so public I can't even think the word 'alone'. And home is currently a holding pattern of the temporary apartment rigged up as we look for our first real home (fireproof of course). And I can't tell you how much I miss the familiar people and places of Atlanta or even the old house. Place doesn't fit yet, but it will someday.

It's space: Or more true, a need for. Where oh where is my studio? I'm still and will still and can still squat space at work and I do have room to make clay but a place to be messy, a place to create, a place that is ours is potential not actual.

Grumble, grumble, hiss but really these are surmountable obstacles and all is a creative challenge. I resolve to give less to my dayjob (yup, I'm taking lunch and leaving when 8 hours is up- my job is a great one but I do not get paid enough to give the blood I give), remember that the house search is temporary, adapt in whatever way I can my workplace (there are strategies I have yet to try), carve spaces to make art wherever I can for the now and the soon, and draw it all up in mandatory art-making sessions at the begin or the end of each day.

I'm around art students all the time and all of the working artists I know have daily doubts, questions, concerns, thoughts, anxieties and everything elses about the money, time, commitment, and marketing required to make art for more than just oneself. If we don't share our doubts, the art students won't know and the whole system can never change. It may never be easy to follow your gut to make art but it can be easier, I think. I hope. I dream.

So, I'll turn the computer off, turn the sketchbook on, share a painting with you from a couple of months ago when I was actively painting (see below), and wash the nonsense out of my head. There is a reason for all the work I do (dayjob and making art) and I am certainly not the only kid working this hard. There's a comfort, too, to the fact that even without solid space or place the pace keeps me going, albeit going fast.

take care,
Rachael

Below is Uplift and Improvement, 2005 and it did survive the fire.