Getting more studio time in my day

I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks ago with one of my artist friends. Both of us, well into retirement, are finding it harder to make time for our art than we did when we were working. How could that be? As we talked about it, we realized that the demands of our teaching jobs were so great that we needed to be very purposeful about carving out time for our art, which was not connected to our jobs. That kind of planning for set-aside time seemed unnecessary when the huge expanse of former work-time opened up in retirement. But it hasn’t worked out that way. What has been keeping me out of the studio? I know that it’s key to get to my studio in the morning (the best time of the day for me), but I also like to be at the computer first thing, to set up my schedule for the day and get to rid of any e-mails that need a quick response. But once at my computer, it's very hard to avoid following one link or another, reading the NYTimes, etc., and the first thing I know it's noon. . .  I recently figured out a few things that are helping me get more studio time into my day:

1) I have switched that initial computer time to before I go downstairs for breakfast. Because I'm eager to get down to the kitchen to have my daily latte and something to eat, this has been very effective at keeping me to the truly essential stuff that I need to get out of the way.  Then when I go back upstairs, I go directly into the studio. I've been staying there for as much as four hours, with a break for lunch. Then in mid-afternoon, I go back to the computer in my office, to look at accumulated e-mail and to do assorted desk tasks. I like how this is working out so far. Sometimes appointments or other responsibilities take up some of the allotted studio time, but whenever I get even just a couple of hours a day in the studio, it’s a good day!

2) As I started with this new routine, I realized that there was some computer work that is central to my art, e.g. note-taking/planning for my art work and also writing blog posts. I've always done this work at the desk-top computer in my office, but amidst the lists of other tasks, which usually need to be done by a certain time. Even when I do start on a blog post, I'm sitting in the midst of my desk environment, and it's easy to get distracted by other stuff that "needs" to get done. In the middle of studio time on one of the early days of my new schedule, I needed to do some writing, but dreaded going into the office to use the computer. Brainstorm! I could bring upstairs to the studio the laptop that has lived on the first floor, where I rarely use it. So here I am now, writing a blog post on my laptop, which now lives on the cutting table in my studio. I am surprised--and pleased--by how different it feels—that I’m doing creative work rather than "required" tasks. It’s a small change (just changing the location of a computer), but it is having a big impact.

3) I’ve started setting an alarm to wake up in the morning, for 7-1/2 hours of sleep from when I turn out the light, which is an ample amount of sleep for me. One of the joys of retirement has been not having to set an alarm every weekday morning. But if I sleep an extra hour or more in the morning, that’s time lost from my most productive time of the day. So as part of re-claiming morning time for my art, I’m setting the alarm. This too is working well.

Claiming time for my art has a new urgency for me. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve slowly realized that I’m in a different stage of life than I was in the earlier years of my retirement. From the deaths and illnesses among friends, family, and acquaintances, I’ve become more aware that my own time is limited too. Perhaps another ten good, productive years? Yes, it could be more or less than that, but it feels very different from the 20+ years I could expect when I retired thirteen years ago. Not that I thought of it that way in 2012—instead I just felt an enormous sense of an open future with many possibilities ahead. But now I’m conscious of having entered a new stage of life--old age. Before now, my image of old age was of people who looked really old (always relative of course) and who were significantly limited physically, not a description I fit into. But now I understand old age as a stage of life unrelated to physical characteristics. For me, it’s the stage in which it makes sense to keep in mind the preciousness of whatever time I have left, and to use that time well. Understanding this has led me to the opposite of anxiety about steadily diminishing time--to a commitment to let go of things that are not so important to me (or that can be turned over to others) and to focus on the things that give me contentment and fulfillment: being with family and friends, making art, contributing to the lives of others. 

As I write about this, I remember these words from Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Yes. 

16 months later, continuing with "Persistence"

My last blog post was written in July 2024. When I wrote that post, I had decided to work somewhat improvisationally on “Persistence,” rather than making a specific plan for placement of the lines of stitching, and I was pleased with the first section as I worked on it. Work was slow, but I continued for a while. By January 2025, I had stitched part of one set of alignments, including a circular arc that represented a configuration of stones found at one end of the alignment, probably lining out an area of gathering. 

In January, as part of an online course with Claire Benn, I started meeting with a critique group; we talked once a week, discussing our work in progress. After showing photos of “Persistence,” I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with the composition as it was developing. I followed a suggestion that I test out a different configuration by trying out paper shapes on the fabric, rather than sketching lines, and that led me to a new composition. I’ll still have three sets of alignments, as there are at Carnac, but I won’t try to replicate in any way the kind of winding layout of the three, but have changed them to three parallel sets, and I’ve also left out the semicircular lines of stones.

I realized that I didn’t need to replicate the actual shapes or spatial arrangements of the three major sets of alignments at Carnac, that it would be better to free up the composition in order to express the central themes that interested me (mainly persistence, but also variation, collaboration).  This has happened to me in almost every major art piece I’ve made—starting out with a presentation that stays close to the explicit/literal level of content, but then moving further to abstraction/expression. In the course of making the change on this piece, I came across a relevant quotation that I’d put on the bulletin board in my studio but forgotten about:

"Each stage, each track you set off on, requires a great deal of attention. You must learn to recognize which ideas are the most interesting ones: follow the lines that are most expressive, or the trails that are unexpected or intriguing. Learn to focus on the most promising areas and leave out details that are too distracting or conventional, because these may detract from what is interesting. If you set off without a clear goal in mind, you must also gradually learn to recognize your goal as you work and to develop it. Every motif, every source of inspiration can become an inexhaustible field of discovery, as well as a means of enriching your artistic vocabulary and your imagination."

Francois Tellier-Loumagne, The Art of Embroidery

I clipped out the stitches I had already done and started again. I outlined with a white running stitch the three areas to be filled with the small stitches of the alignments and started on one of them. I have been stitching off and on since then, sometimes every morning for a half-hour or so (about all I can do in a sitting), but also with stretches away from it. 

Sometime this summer, as the work took shape, I realized that even though I had finalized (and was satisfied with) the plan for the work, and had made significant progress on the stitching of it, I wasn’t sure that the work, when completed, would be that interesting to look at, that it might not work as a large visual piece. But I kept working on it nonetheless, because in the making, I had started thinking of it as a kind of performance piece, but performance art for one person—for me—rather than for a wider audience, a performance that would eventually take about two years. When I mentioned this to my critique group, one member suggested that I make a video of me working on the piece, as a way of sharing my experience of making the work. So I’ve made a video that shows me stitching on the work, talking about how the stitches and the process of stitching are, for me, a kind of homage to the work those people, six thousand years ago, who placed one large stone after another, in line after line. This video is an unedited trial version. Distracting things to ignore: the colorful pattern you see is the carpet beneath my feet; the white rectangle is a piece of paper on which I’d written some notes. I will likely do a revised version, to have available when I eventually exhibit the work. In the meantime, here's the video, about 15 minutes long:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JPDgrpsQgVipP-sOag2cEGog2KFqp-MM/view. If that link doesn't work, you can also see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1JRD_DnUJE

And just one more photo of the stitching, as I think the close-up image I tried to give in the video didn’t show well enough the variation of the silk-wrapped linen yarn from Habu Textiles.