Spring clean

Thoughts on hoarding

I cleared the studio yesterday- not the good kind where you look about and it looks amazing, disappointingly it looks about the same, but I cleared out all the cupboards, which I’ll notice when I open the wardrobe door without causing a life endangering avalanche.  Many of the things on my mending pile have been there so long I’ve learnt to live without them, so they went into the recycling, which frees up a lot of time, space and guilt.

After a good tidy up, the studio still looks like this - cluttered, covered in paint, stuffed with plants. At least I tried. This is me looking defeated by my own mess.

As I went through my sketchbook pages I noticed that I hoard ideas like  broken things that could be fixed, If I only had the time. I think I was under the impression that ideas were rare and precious and should be stowed carefully;  I find books of careful lists from the distant past that no longer even make sense. ‘The memory of fish’ it reads, ‘mags earphones thought clouds’

I place the entire book in the big with the broken mugs and the plaid shirts with a rip I no longer wear. I do not look at anymore of the contents, if I did, I might feel nostalgic towards them, like I owed them something, because some of them are not gibberish, they are actually good ideas; they’re just not good ideas for me anymore. They might be a very successful project for someone else, but I need to learn to discriminate. Ideas are not rare or precious; a friend was complaining how annoying it is while you make something you get six different variations of other things you’d also like to make. If you work in a creative field and you train your brain that way, ideas seem to be annoyingly commonplace.

Some sketchbooks I didn’t toss out with snakes and dragon clouds because I like to hoard and dragons love a good hoard.

For the past year I’ve been reacquainting myself with linocut,  more focussed on how the work will challenge me, offer me new skills. I’ve not been too fussy about what I was carving, hopping about from subject to subject like a fly in a sweet shop. Recently I’ve been printing,and feeling an increasing pressure to be carving too, to get the next project on the go; but I’ve held off. I don’t want to rush into ideas. It takes a lot of work to go from an idea to a fully formed print, I want to make sure the work is moving me in a direction I want to do and all these old ideas are for old me, someone years ago, and I’ve moved on from it.

I’ve been hoarding too long. Projects I will do in some future with free time, ideas, crafts, broken things I intend to fix that sit about the place for years. I call time on them. If they are not done within a year, they are not getting done. Release the mental burden of things I’ve not done, return them to the charity shops, let someone else have a go.

I need to start carving again, it’s my happy place, but I need to think of a new idea, which is not hard. They are not rare or precious things, they are commonplace and I am rich in them. I do not need to hoard. I think I might draw a dragon to celebrate this new discovery. Probably a sea serpent. I always did like the wriggly Anglo Saxon wyrms better than the fat winged French types. There see. An idea, they are all over the place.

This months reading

Reading list: I’ve nearly finished The Pebble book written by Christopher Stocks and peppered with Angie Lewis’s  charming drawing and prints. It’s not a hard read, though I suppose I do have a background in geology. Worth it for the pictures alone. Also reading  Stephen Ellcock’s latest, The Cosmic Dance. They are words, which go in through my eyes and fall into an unknowable black hole never to be remembered by my conscious mind again, but that doesn’t matter because again, I’m here for the pictures.

I was going to take a picture of the lilac but instead here’s a frosty spiderweb on the window, pretend you can see the lilacs in the background. You might as well imagine some goldfinch on them eating some seeds while you’re at it.

In the garden: flocks of goldfinch eat the lilac seeds. You’re supposed to prune the lilacs after they bloom, because, while there’s nothing more beautiful than a lilac in bloom as soon as the drop they become blackened with unslightly seed heads, but I’m lazy and I glad to let the goldfinches do the job. I’d rather look at a lilac seed than do pruning, and it’s feeding my friends who refuse to eat from the feeder (I do not know why, I have see other peoples goldfinches eat from the feeder but I can’t tempt them with any amount of nigella seed).

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