Hunting The Muse

Vertigo, 1982

I've been thinking about writing a blog for a while now. I used to write daily but fell out of the habit when life got so busy and time so elusive.... after I entered the world decisively, as a wife, step-mother, woman with a steady, emotionally and physically demanding, worldly job. When I lived alone and often went on retreat, my writing seemed a lifeline both to the physical world I did not inhabit comfortably, and a delicate tether to the otherworldly. Finding painting was a turning inward for me, finally with a purpose, though one I could not articulate. Prompted once in critique with a very famous painter to explain what it was I was after I could only say, hopelessly, "to make a better painting". I couldn't blame him for giving up and turning to someone more interesting.

Hedge, 1985

I dropped out of grad school in tears of frustration. I am sorry now that I saw it as a defeat, a retreat from something too difficult for me, a lack of fitness. I was wordless for so long, my journals taking to describing the weather, simple activities of my day, random fleeting thoughts, simply to record something, anything, of the amorphous, shape-shifting inner life I seemed destined to live. Ten years, twenty, now thirty since I started mixing paint, scraping palettes, wrestling with canvas, frustration and hope in equal measures. I felt lost when I could not record, just as I felt lost when I couldn't mess around with paint.

What was I doing? It felt as if I was building something completely from scratch in those days. Yes there were guideposts, other artists, writers that I could look to. But my own voice was as distant and faint to me as a radio signal in the jungle.

So I begin again, without really any idea of where I'm going with this. But I have a lexicon now, of sorts... words and symbols and wide swaths of colour that I hoist up like sails to see what breeze catches on them.