Day Three

It was 5pm before I summoned the courage to begin drawing.
My space had been ready since midday, and I spent the afternoon buying a pot plant and sleeping with my mouth open in my new old chair.

I have promised myself I will do practical tasks where creativity eludes me. I need a way to keep moving in the studio. It is an interesting thing to start fresh with a clear knowledge of my habits and tendencies. Cutting paper down to size is my least favourite - but necessary - studio task. It requires little brain power and virtually no creativity. I organised my tools and set to work, cutting more paper than was immediately necessary, so that I wouldn't meet that stumbling block again for a while. I nailed it all up on the wall, so that spanking white pages stared out at me, innocent and threatening at once. I sat down in my new old chair again.

Julia Cameron says, take care of the quantity and the quality will take care of itself.
I thought of Leonard Cohen claiming he never has any good ideas, but just chips away at things till something is good.

I'm not exactly a stranger to inspiration, but I don't generally work from it directly.
It's funny: when I am away from the studio, or kept from drawing by work or other obstacles, the world is full of beauty, surprise and meaning. Little things open up their secrets and show me fleeting glimpses of a cohesive universe, a pure, wordless understanding of everything, before becoming merely pegs again, or merely shoes, or merely a heron in the suburban wetlands, dishevelled by a sudden gust of wind.
But in the studio, where I must take some responsibility for these revelations, must translate them, redesign them, compose them - the task seems quite beyond me and, disappointed by my futility, the vision ebbs away and I am left with only an indistinct memory, and a slight concern that I may be just a little unhinged. Mostly, I draw pegs or rags, not because they are showing me the world, but because they did once, for a fraction of a second, and I hope to draw it out again.

So, it took a massive effort of will to get out of the chair and begin, yesterday (and no, it's not the chair's fault. I can easily spend hours sitting on a lumpy concrete floor if procrastination demands. The chair just saves me from associated injury). But beginning, in the end, contains its own, other magic. Almost immediately, the object has another interpretation, another existence, even. The drawing, like a newborn, is straight-away irrefutably present and demanding, and has a unique beauty or interest for me that did not exist, even in imagination, before I began.