I have been doing an inventory of certain supplies and gathering several new hues and panels toward a workshop I will be taking next month; investing toward meaningful production. Just spending the money is hard. It must be a work of faith and hope too. I want to be stingy, and make do; but I also know that unless I am ready to give it up again, there will be no worthy result out of this studio. The whole process is another reminder that this slog is hard work emotionally, physically, every which way. Sometimes I think being an artist is like being a glutton for punishment. (I used to think that same thing about raising teenagers, another rare art form of faith and hope). Now that the teenagers are grown and I get to do concentrated work in my studio, I guess I need to remember that it is just another form of the same battle. It is battle. So strange, that something so fun could also be so perplexingly hard! Willa Cather said “Artistic growth is a defining of the sense of truthfulness. Only the great artist knows how difficult it is.” I am so encouraged by that statement. For it was in the raising of young people and in the working of art that truthfulness is one of my highest motivations. One of my kids just said to me last month “…that’s because for you Mom, truth is such a core value.” Hearing her say that over a difficult thing we were processing, was very satisfying to me.

So I am pondering a lot of things today: the hard battle, the investment of hope needed in that battle, and the spine of truth that enables any real progress. We’ll see what comes of this next month. Meanwhile, I can highlight here a small cold wax panel that got selected into a good local show. This is called “Unseen Working; Gathering Undercurrent.”