I met a new friend, a fellow artist-writer-creative-human-being-doing-her-thing today for coffee. She gets that street cred moniker because as we started talking, comparing our lives, our daily-ness, it came to me that part of what makes an artist isn’t always what he or she is producing but how we are LIVING. The living is what makes the art. The boring victories like getting to the post office to mail orders AND write, the sweet moments we can have coffee in the afternoon because we’re up at 5am painting or emailing or meditating or cleaning the house, the roller coaster of financial worries that are omniscient yet don’t dissuade us from joining the 9-5 schedule. All of it is thrilling and messy and, hit me so profoundly today, impossible to explain if you’re not stringing half a dozen projects together and hoping that once sewed they will make a quilt of sorts. I sat in awe and respect listening to this fellow artist talk of art shows, printing promo postcards, workshops, travel, writing groups and all sorts of delightful creativity in action activities. She is walking her walk. This is the good stuff. This is the gas in the car, the joyful action steps that allow artists, myself included, to do the things we love to do. Action. Baby steps. Micromovements. The emails to potential customers. The dozen bad poems so you can have one good one. The 100 paintings so you can have 20 to print into cards. The year long out reach to cafes and wineries and galleries for nothing but no, thanks, and then a miraculous yes when you least expect it. All of it, mysterious except for the charge of energy that we agreed goes through everything we do. Faith. And a sense of humor. Faith that somehow all those wacky breadcrumbs are actually placed in exactly the perfect spot. And a sense of humor, that in this town, those breadcrumbs better be gluten-free.
“French Press” 18×24″ available at ElizabethW Carmel 831.626.3892