It's rounding into Labor Day weekend here in the States, which is a great tradition (thank you Labor Movement) and the symbolic end of summer no matter what the weather happens to be doing.
This summer has been admittedly mixed. Artistically, it's been pretty solid - a show in July, signing a representation agreement with Zeitgeist Gallery in Beverly, feeling my creativity and flow come back after the exhausting push to finish Merope.
But the rest of the summer - this last month of it, specifically - has been hard. I've been following the events and related conversations surrounding Ferguson closely, attending a couple of rallies and marches against police brutality but spending most of the month feeling helpless and impotent. It's exactly the sort of feeling that art can help process...except it hasn't, yet.
I have ideas and pieces and bits of work that relate, but my heart is so centered on what's happening right now that I can't get enough distance from it to find a creative handhold. It's the paradox of my creative process - I need a deep emotional connection to the subject I'm working on, but enough emotional space to actually create the work. In the case of "injustice", a universal and still deeply personal concept, I have not yet grasped the specific thread within this web of rage and righteousness that I need to create the work I can feel is aching to be made.
I share this with you, dear visitor, because it's something I sometimes I forget myself: "the process" can be ugly and protracted and meandering but at times it is all necessary to create art that matters.