" Plain and simple, I was in a rut. And I was not alone. My friend Melinda had been in the same sour rut, but not quite as deep as myself. We had discussed the problem many times in our weekly chats. Really, I want to call them chats…they were marathons. We were therapy to each other from art to family and back again with illness spattered in between. Both of us had this angst about climbing over the edge of the rut but we kept getting slammed down again. First I dealt with a bum hip and then cancer, we moved twice and then I had a three year stint with a chronic illness that got out of hand. Then if that wasn't enough, I got a bug in my spinal cord of all places and spent six months healing up from a neck fusion. Melinda lost family members and friends, had to play nursemaid to everybody else and then her body gave out from stress. Not just a little bit, it slapped her on the ground. Rut, rut, rut! We wanted out!
My husband
Bob and I had gone for my six month check with the spine surgeon and we managed
a trip to see my daughter Aimee, her husband John and my sweet grandson
Sam. Everyone was either sick with a
cold, was recovering from a cold or was getting a cold. We decided to go home early. On that long six hour drive from Eugene back
home to Seattle I kept thinking about my life and how I wanted it to
change. Silently my mind went back to
some posts I had noticed on Pinterest about different items an inch
square in size. I had even made an inch square
book at one time.
Melinda
loved tiny things as much or more than I did, and in a flash I knew how to get
out of the rut. We would re-enter the
world of art one inch at a time. I
called her as soon as we were home – literally!
The bags sat at the garage door as I was on the phone. In a few minutes we had both said “yes” to
the idea and had decided some important parameters to guide us on our
journey. We didn't want to commit to one
inch a day, but four a week sounded do-able.
We wanted some sort of color harmony so we decided on a large scale from
yellow through purple. No red! No orange!
It could be as flat as a hair or as high as a cube. It could be from a magazine or from nature. We
wanted to keep our time to just a half hour, though on special occasions or to
celebrate special things, we could go a little longer. We wanted to do this by
month because most months have 4 weeks in them and we would be doing this
project 4 days a week and that would make a cube. We both liked that concept. The only problem was that it was January 21
and we were already 12 inches behind. We
decided to go for it because the challenge would get us going at a run.
The first
night I got out my sketch pad and sketch kit and sat down to watch TV with my
husband. I have known for years that the
best way to watch TV is with something to do in my hands, but during all of the
“rut” I sat blankly staring at a television set. We are strict around our house, no cable and
no network TV; just movies or Netflix.
Still, I had way too much television on my score pad and now was the
time to make use of some of that down time.
I began
sketching…”ho hum, what to sketch, what to sketch” and then I saw Bob’s
shoes. That’s better than the typical
thumb for the first thing to sketch, so I was away at it. Unbelievably I was able to get both shoes and
a sock into the picture, leaving room for a little floor and wall. Shoes and all were living in an inch in my
sketch book. An inch!
The next
sketch came without even thinking. We
have living with us a brother/sister pair of orange tabby cats named Yahoo (f)
and Google (m). Yahoo had just sprinted
up to my lap and was peering into my face with her nose about three inches from
my face. I drew her great big nose as my
eyes saw them, without even thinking about the proportion. It is just how it appeared. Drat!
I had used ORANGE. The second
drawing and I had erred. I have always
had trouble sticking to the rules."
Over the past month I have finished all of January's drawings and sealed them in an envelope. I don't want to depend on looking back, only looking ahead. I have finished February's drawings early for three reasons: 1) I want to put my drawings into book form and I need to allow time to actually make the book, 2) February's drawing process took on a life of its own and I just kept going, 3) I want to allow space for the unexpected in life. This feels right to me. It seems like maybe I should be working (i.e. our expected pace), but February seems complete to me and I want to honor the muse of completed work.
Now, to use that extra time to figure out why my phone won't sync with my computer so I can publish a photo of what I'm working on now. Coming soon...
