You know how you can be thinking something and thinking that something for a long time and it gets all fixed in your head and you start to believe your idea of this particular reality and you believe it so thoroughly that it seems impossible that anyone else would not also believe it and then you actually say that thing out loud and almost instantaneously everything changes so that your very fixed idea about this thing is so woefully out of date that it is remarkable that anyone, let alone yourself, ever believed such a thing? You know?
Well, that's sort of what happened when I wrote that post about losing my fire around making art. Whatever process that happened around writing about what I had been thinking for months opened things up and - wait? Was that a spark of something creative that I felt burning inside? I went to my studio and sorted through the work I made at the Saltonstall Foundation residency and, you know, it didn't totally suck. In fact, there are some solid ideas there worth pursuing. Note to self: go to studio more often.
The thing that signaled most clearly that a shift was happening in my entrenched "I am the worst artist ever" energy is that I was noodling around on Newfoundland real estate websites (hey - some people collect stamps, ok?) and I found a listing for a former high school in a wee town way up at the tip of the Northern Peninsula, St. Lunaire-Griget. And I wanted to buy it and make something BIG. The back story about this is that, fourteen years ago when we were looking to buy a house in Newfoundland, we came across a former school building in a wee town on White Bay. Like this one, it is available for a crazy low price. At that point, I was married to someone who thinks very, very practically and he entertained me and my fantasy for a brief - very brief - period of time before listing off all the ways that buying a huge building in a tiny, remote community was a bad idea. So we ended up with our (now, my) lovely house in Gillams instead.
Clearly, it was a wise decision....and yet. The "what ifs" have haunted me ever since.
So, what would you do with a 25,000 sq.ft. building in a town of 600 where it snows in June on a regular basis?
Maybe going to Rome later this month will actually help to dampen the fire!
I don't know but I'm prone to similar impulses. Luckily my fella is a builder so he just raises one eyebrow and says nothing until it passes. We have an old school residence here you might like, also very good possibility of snow in June. Just saying. Maybe together we could turn it into an art funhouse. Just writing that gets me crazy. Hey! We have an artist in residence program here in North West River! You should do it. By now, have to go get a thousand in on my new novel before work.
ReplyDeleteMy ears perked up - what? Artist residency in NWR? Sign me up! And the old schoolhouse? Yes to that, as well! It is so easy for get how overwhelmed I often feel just taking care of the things I already have on the go. And yet.....and yet.....
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