No.8 Hard Lines Blur and Get Redrawn
In which events shift a perspective long calcified, kindling a light in dark days.
For a long time I was one of the people who hated winter. I enjoyed the Holiday season for its jollity, and seeing family over the break, but dreaded and loathed the doldrums that followed—cold dark January and February; the windy wet nightmare typical of March. I’d have traded away those days to speed ahead to spring.
It was the first winter after the start of the pandemic that changed this. The initial panic and stress had somewhat eased thanks to vaccinations. Yet loss and grief remained, and with the weight of them came a need to slow down; to absorb and process a great deal. An acute awareness of what’s important rearranged things in many minds.
In those cold weather lockdowns were opportunities to make the most of forced isolation—to immerse in loads of anti-social things generally ascribed to winter anyway; drawing, thinking, reading. No social engagements loomed, and many things on lists from the time before went suddenly irrelevant. All of us feeling a little shapeless and at a loss. A long stretch of liminal time and space which, unlike winter, had no known end point, A blurring and dissolution of what we’d thought of as our lives; thought was ‘reality’.
Now I anticipate the long dark like a visit from an old friend. In January of ’21 I started keeping a daybook*. It began primarily as a way to track creative pursuits as I dug more heavily into making art than I had in years. I’d gotten reacquainted with the sheer play of it via an online class with Louise Fletcher. In the book, I recorded studio time, exhibit deadlines, sales, &c. Eventually and invariably, I allowed all the rest to sneak in: ah-ha moments, things in the the garden, exercise, travels and visits with friends and family— all recorded in a kind of shorthand. Around the New Year, I spend a some time going back through the past year and thinking on the shape of the nascent one.
I’ve been up at the farm visiting my family for the Christmas holiday. As happens these days the weather has been unseasonably warm, and there’ve been some wonderfully misty mornings, serene as snow—or nearly.
The space between Christmas and the New Year is also a liminal one—a brief span of time in which it feels okay to be lost in the mist, a little blurred around the edges. A new year approaches with its unaccustomed number and many unknowns. I’ll add them to the book of days as they emerge— learning as I go, being shaped by events and the memories they leave behind.
Thanks for reading. I hope good experiences and welcome tidings await you in the year to come.
’Til next time—
Liz
*The notion and general approach of the daybook was something I picked up from Alice Sheridan’s Connected Artist group. I’ve tweaked and amended the structure to suit, and it’s been a life-changing habit. This practice has picked up where my sketchbooks left off some years ago. My sketchbooks used to be the closest thing I had to a diary or journal, but the daybooks are more efficient at record-keeping. They’ve also alleviated my sketchbooks of any responsibility beyond ‘art’. (That sounds rather nice, doesn’t it?)
Such beautiful photography 🙌🙌🙌