Doors, windows, and escape hatches

This post is mostly off-topic ramblings created by my coffee soaked Sunday morning brain, but it speaks to where I am in my life. If you're here for art and dance...check back later, I'm sure I'll update following my sword workshop this afternoon.

I've written before about my mother and father's turns of phrase. They are such colorful people, and I am lucky to have them in my life. Today I am musing on one of my mom's catch phrases: "When God closes a door, He opens a window." My mother is very religious person and though we had disagreements about her faith versus mine often when I was younger, I have come to deeply respect my mother's faith. Though I do not share all of her beliefs, we have a much wider overlap than I once thought, and I have to give her major thumbs up-edness for her conviction and dedication to both her principles and faith.

That being said, I still like to rephrase my mother's saying in my own head to: "When the universe locks all the doors, it will provide an escape hatch (even if the hatch happens to be under a heavy rock in the less used corner of your personal metaphysical space)"

My mom's phrase is SO much more succinct, don't you think.

Yet, both mean the same thing. There are always opportunities and possibilities in your life. You always have more options than you think you do. Just because a choice is difficult, scary, or new to you doesn't mean that you can't make it.

We all get stuck in ruts, look at our lives, and feel like we just can't get out or can't change. Example: I could never move to X place because I have all of this heavy furniture that would just be so difficult to get there. Solution: get rid of everything and start over in X place. Yes, it's a super scary idea for us modern folks, but think about it. Once upon a time whole families consolidated all of their belongings down to what they could carry and journeyed across the sea, mountains, desert, etc to find a new life and they did it all without bank accounts, cars, bottled water, restaurants, air conditioning, etc. It wasn't easy, but they did it...and you can overhaul your life too if you so choose. You just have to make the choice.

Most of the time, we are faced with issues much less dramatic than above, but that doesn't mean that facing a new direction in our lives isn't just as frightening as the idea of giving up everything and starting over, because many times that is exactly what we feel like we are doing. Starting a new job or leaving an old, moving to a new home, ending or beginning a relationship - are all the emotional equivalent to starting completely from scratch...and making the choice to do any of these things can be terrifying because once you chose, you have dedicated yourself to that path and must make it work at all costs...wrong. There's an escape hatch somewhere, even if you have to look under the metaphysical rug to find it.

I have recently been inspired to get up, shake the dust off of my brain, and make some frightening decisions. The results are still coming in, but I've got one dance class set and ready to go starting in July on Wednesdays at Equilibrium Zen Gym and two more in the works, hopefully starting in two weeks. I'm waiting to hear back from a group of artists that I may be sharing studio space with downtown, my work is going into a gallery in Columbia at the end of July, and I'm looking for a new place to live. It took a lot of emotional preparation to get here, and I'm terrified of failing, but I'm going for it anyway. And I know that if it doesn't work out, somewhere in my metaphysical room, the universe will stick an escape hatch, even if I have to conjure an invisible ladder to get to it.

Wherein I Make Use of Little Space and Create Happy Accidents

Silk Pillow Drying on a Kitty Litter Platform

 As a working artist living in an apartment the size of my childhood bedroom with another person, I have rediscovered that age old adage "make use of that which is available." The hardest thing to come across here is space...and in silk painting, you need a lot of space. Space to store dyes, space to paint, space for items to dry, space to spread out newsprint in order to steam your silks, space for steaming, for washing, for ironing....my point should be quite obvious.

Usually, I paint silks on my coffee table. It is large enough for me to work on all but the largest pieces that I paint (one of the main reasons I haven't been making very many veils or large wall hangings in the past few years.)

Silk Pillow Drying On My Wine Rack

But, once again, life lessons imparted to me at a young age by my father come to play a part in my professional development. My father has a place for everything, even a special nail in his shop on which he places used twist ties and one next to it on which he places rubber bands. If you were to walk into my father's shop and tell him that you had a broken whossawhatsit and that you needed a small piece of plastic pipe, he would take you to the plastic pipe department and find the perfect piece. If he couldn't find the perfect piece, he'd cut you one or in dire circumstances, somehow create the perfect piece of pipe using glue, a dowel rod, and some plastic that he had lying around.

Extra Limbs Made Her Far More Normal

I'm not as good as my father about knowing where everything is, but I have a "cloth department" and an "adhesives" area where you can find multiple types of glue, tape, and even my stapler. The talent that I have inherited and developed is the ability to make use of whatever I have available whenever I need something that I do not have....in this instance, since lack of space is one of my biggest problems, I have found a variety of ways to create the space I need.

When I paint, in order to let one piece dry and work on the next, I create drying racks with old kitty litter containers. Once pieces are dry enough to remove from the rack but not completely dry, they are then placed "somewhere" to dry - in this instance, draped across my wine rack.

Finished

I use this inherited talent in other ways...happy accidents. Sometimes I don't sketch a piece out before I put the resist lines on the fabric and I just free hand it. In this case, I began with her head, the far left arm, and her hair, I then filled in the body and added an arm. She looked strange, out of proportion, and I decided that what she really needed was an extra set of arms and legs.
Because that's how you fix someone who is disproportionate - you add extra limbs...why not?

Ok, so I admit that it was a strange solution and the final piece did turn out slightly odd, but I love it. Maybe she's a goddess, or maybe she's moving...as in the best art, the viewer gets to decide exactly what/why is happening in this piece. I'm just happy that it happened.