The Work You Can't See
On what counts as making, even when nothing gets made.
There is a block on my calendar that I have a complicated relationship with. Eleven to two, every day, labeled “studio time / paint.” And every day that I don’t paint, I walk past it and give it a look. Not guilt exactly. Something more like the look you give a friend you keep meaning to call. I see you. I know.
I have been having a lot of those days lately.
If I am being honest, and I am trying to be, the last few months have been a strange mix. Stretches of not painting. Then a few days where I can’t stop, where the hours disappear and I come up for air at four in the afternoon not entirely sure where the time went. Then quiet again. I used to look at that pattern and see a problem. A discipline issue. Evidence that I was not serious enough, or consistent enough, or whatever enough. But when I actually sit with it, when I stop measuring it against the calendar block and just look at it plainly, I can see that this has always been how I work. It has always been this. I just kept hoping I would eventually fix it into something more linear.
I am an INFP. A Projector. An intuitive. All of which are just different ways of saying: I am extremely porous to everything around me. My energy, my surroundings, the particular quality of light on a given morning. A conversation from four days ago I am still turning over. The length of my to-do list. Whether Mercury is in retrograde, probably. All of it comes in. All of it affects what I can make. For a long time I treated this as a flaw, something to work around or compensate for. I am slowly, slowly learning to treat it as information instead.
Here is what has been sitting with me lately. I look at the grids, my squares, the work I have been making for months now, and I love them. I genuinely do. I love the repetition, the quiet, the way that simple container lets color do exactly what it wants without anything else getting in the way. And at the same time there is something else. A feeling I don’t quite have words for yet. Something from my earlier work that I am not sure is showing up in these. A willingness to let things get a little ugly. A looseness. I don’t know if I have traded that for restraint or grown into restraint or if restraint is just where I am right now and the looseness will come back.
Some days I think the grids are the most honest work I have ever made. Some days I wonder if I am hiding inside them a little. Both of those things feel true and I have not figured out how to hold them at the same time yet. What I do know is that this is not a problem to be solved in the mind. Sitting with the question, taking no action, is not the way through. I have to get back to the actual work. The painting. My studio, my actual studio. Looking at my work. Spending twenty minutes moving paintings around to see them differently, see what they might need, what they might be missing, what they might want to be friends with. Let the work tell me what needs to be painted next. More grids and lines, maybe. But with a little more looseness this time.
This, the not knowing, the looking, the sitting with a question that won’t resolve: I have started to think this is the work. Not the thing that happens before the work starts. The actual work. The walk where I notice a flower in bloom in a shade I have never thought to mix. The morning I spend reading instead of painting because something in the book is going to matter in three weeks in a way I cannot see yet. I have written before about the eye, about noticing as something you practice and develop and return to. This feels like the same thing said a different way. The artist is always working. Even when nothing is being made. Because what is being made in those in-between hours is something harder to point to: her sense of what she wants to say. What she is moving toward. What she is not ready to make yet but is getting ready.
If this landed with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who would get it. A friend who makes things, a designer you admire, someone who has a complicated relationship with their own calendar block. Word of mouth is everything for a solo artist and I do not take it for granted.
And if you have been thinking about bringing a painting into your home or a project you are working on, my studio is open for commissions. I would love to make something with you. Reach me at jill@colorkindstudio.com and we can start there.
So glad you are here. xx