Who wants to see some sexy mountmaking pictures? That’s right, YOU do!

Brass cradle mount for a ceramic creamer mold.

Creamer mold mount with the object in place.

Brass cradle mount for a ceramic teapot spout mold.

Teapot spout mould mount with the object in place.

Two American Indian knife sheath mounts (in progress).

Three American Indian knife sheath mounts (in progress).

Okay, so there were more than these, but these were the ones I was proud enough of to take pictures of.

This weekend is busy – my husband’s brother and BFF are coming in town, so there’s all the attendant cleaning and prep for that. (By prep I mean buying beer.) I’m going to an open house for a tiny prefab home tomorrow in Perryville, MO, about 90 minutes south on I-55.

Speaking of tiny homes (a small (ha! ha!) obsession of mine, as you may know), I had a weird experience last week. I was watching a TED talk on building a “Seed Cathedral” and all of a sudden found myself in tears. Not sad tears, like big-time-emotional-groundswell tears. I was overwhelmed by the desire to be a part of something like that architectural firm. They have created built environments of literally breathtaking beauty and sensitivity – can you imagine being part of a team that dreams those things up? (Go watch the talk. It’s 15 minutes out of your day and you were going to spend 15 minutes goofing off on Facebook anyway.)

Of course, my first response was to slam the lid down on that Pandora’s box because a wish like that seems too big, too powerful. A wish like that could turn my whole life upside down, if I let it. Plus, my mom would never let me hear the end of it (I can’t even remember how many times she gently wondered aloud if I would like being an architect).

But if I’ve learned anything from the past couple years of self-work, it’s that when your body gives you a signal that clear, you pay attention to it. I mean, I like cooking, but I don’t tear up during Iron Chef.

I don’t know what to do with this right now. I’m holding it close and letting myself think “around” it, if that makes sense. Doing some shiva nata on it. Watching for the next piece to fall into place.

Huh, I didn’t mean to write about this at all. I was just planning on a little “Here’s some cool stuff I did at work!” post, but I guess sometimes you pick your topic and sometimes your topic picks you. Obviously more processing is needed – maybe I’ll even do some of it here. In the meantime, I guess I’ll go return all those library books I’ve got on architectural design (D’oh!).

Exactly what job is this, you ask? I make supportive mounts for art objects that either sit in a case or come out from the wall. St. Louis has some seismic activity, so everything needs to have some degree of support so that it doesn’t shift in an earthquake.

I didn’t exactly start at ground zero of the stuff I need to know, but maybe ground two or three. There are a lot of similarities to the crate fitting and the ushebti project of doom I did at the Nelson, but I’m still in that flailing madly, trying-to-keep-up stage that comes before a real degree of competency. My boss is quiet and funny and very, very patient (more so than I am with myself, most of the time). I want to be awesome at everything immediately, of course, and get frustrated when I make mistakes. I complained to Nathan that I made three different mistakes on a mount that ended up stalling my progress, and he said, “It’s better than making the same mistake three times!” True that. And I am emphatically not bored, which is the best thing so far.

I spent the past two weeks learning how to braze (solder) pieces of brass stock and bend them into small mounts for an upcoming English ceramics rotation. There’s so much about working with metal that you just have to “feel” through experience — watching someone else do it (even a lot, like I have) doesn’t prepare you for the actual sensory cues and muscle memory that you need to build up. I can almost feel my brain crackling with all the new connections it’s been forming. Maybe that’s why I needed a five-hour nap on my first day off.

The extra structure has definitely been a positive thing so far. It’s worth the commute and the early rising to interact with new people and new challenges three days a week, and having a concrete way to mark the passage of time makes it feel like I’m not just freewheeling through life.  My two husbandless days off feel like a graspable amount of time to catch up on things around the house and do the “me-time” things that I never had time for during a traditional weekend. Five days of me-time? Too much. Two seems to be working out just fine so far.

There are more adventures to talk about (the yoga! the blondies! Habitat for Humanity!), but I wrote such a novel of a post last time that I’m letting this one go here. My parents are coming this weekend to visit, and I still have a little cleaning to do.

If you’re not into the novel-esque “crisis-of-identity” type posts, I’d skip this one. Blogging is great free therapy, and it’s more about me writing than you reading.

First, a little background.

For the two months following our move to St. Louis in December, I was in the rare position of not needing to work. I had a three-week gig lined up in March at my old job and I have a part-time thing at the St Louis Art Museum that starts in April. In the meantime…no job, no classes, no homework. I was free to do anything my heart desired, as long as I didn’t spend too much money and/or kill anyone.

I’d been dreaming of this day. DREAMING of it. At last, I will remember what it’s like to feel well-rested! Naps whenever I want! Unlimited studio time! Time for self-discovery!

As it turns out, I actually do well with a little structure in my life.

January and February are a little blurry, frankly, lived in a haze of decentralized anxiety and perhaps a little too much internet time. Was I on vacation? Self-employed? Unemployed? I couldn’t define what this time was for me, and whatever I was doing seemed like the wrong thing for the moment. My husband would come home and ask me how my day was, and I would fret that I hadn’t been productive enough. Since I didn’t have an idea of what “productive” looked like in this weird limbo-time, my chances of ever meeting that goal were slim.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t lie on the couch and agonize about my place in the universe…that much. There was a lot of unpacking and house-setting-up at first, and every few days I would channel my inner June Cleaver and do some laundry or vaccuum or something. I started working out more regularly and made frequent trips to the library.

My full-time job had been both my reason and my excuse for not having figured out great meaning in my life yet. I mean, who has time for that? But when I left my job for unlimited amounts of navel-gazing, things just kept getting more and more fuzzy. I thought I would finally figure out my artistic identity and start making work on a regular basis. This website exists purely because of the fact that someday I thought I would be a professional artist with stuff to sell here.  Setting up the website was actually the most fun part of the process, followed closely by writing blog posts. Actually creating work to put up here and maybe sell someday? …You would not believe the crazy ways I found to procrastinate instead of doing my “dream job” of making art. This isn’t the first time I’ve gone all deer-in-the-headlights on my art, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Fast-forward two months.

In March, I went back to KC for three weeks and got a little perspective on everything. I didn’t really have internet access (which proved decisively how few sites I actually “need” to check regularly, and how much of everything else is dazed link-following) and I had regular hang-out times with people who weren’t my husband, both of which were positive things. On the other hand, my workout practice went out the window, and the emotional eating triggers I thought I’d defused were just waiting in the wings for me to come home from work and reward myself (with chocolate, preferably) for making it through the day without breaking anything.

A week ago, I packed up all my things, said “goodbye forever, once again” (thank you, Jason Webley) to my former coworkers, and made the drive back to St Louis. Where my life has once again come to a screeching halt, but with some differences this time. It’s only been a week, and on Monday I start my job at SLAM. We will see if some structure succeeds where no structure and lots-of-structure both failed. I’m optimistic.

Enter some well-timed internet reading.

Do you read Penelope Trunk? I found one of her articles via an unrelated search, which hit me over the head with something obvious: artists make art because they feel like they will die if they don’t. Which has never been me (with a few notable exceptions). Artists will make art obsessively whether anyone shows any interest or not. They don’t (as a rule) act like they’re really excited about having time to work in the studio and then spend a couple of hours on Pinterest instead. They don’t carry around art supplies from high school that they haven’t used since (they’ve probably used them up and/or broken them by now).

That dazed link-clicking I mentioned earlier brought me to another aha-inducing article, this one about Gen Y. One of the things she mentions from having worked with many of them in her last business venture is that they talk like entrepreneurs, but they don’t really fit the personality profile. Weirdly enough, many of us view entrepreneurship as a safety net, because we can’t be laid off (the way many of our parents were) if we own our own business. Ahahaha. Hello, reality check! As Penelope observes, not many of us have the living-on-the-edge, risk-taking, betting-the-family-car-on-our-business temperament which is actually more typical of Gen X (to which, oddly enough, many/most of the small business bloggers I read regularly belong. Draw your own conclusions.). I certainly don’t. I like adventure, but not the “let’s see if I can make rent this month” kind.

And so…

Armed with these mini-epiphanies, I finally allowed myself to let go of two of the biggest labels that have been hanging over me for hmmm, a while. It’s scary, but also kind of a relief. Like dropping off a load of “fat clothes” at Goodwill and hoping you won’t need them again. I made a commitment to be gently curious about myself this week: “Well, sweetie, if you don’t want to be an artist and/or an entrepreneur, what do you want? How are you spending your time when you’re not avoiding the studio or reading small-business blogs?” That’s about when I figured out that Facebook is not a hobby. Neither is Pinterest or Twitter. They don’t give you clues into what makes you tick or where your happy place is (although Pinterest comes closest of all of them, I believe). They are good ways to casually keep in touch, and they are good 5-minute breaks between real-life activities, but rarely do they provide insight or self-knowledge or meaning. As a result, I’ve been trying to limit my online time this week and not get sucked down the rabbit hole.

I don’t have much else to say. Thanks to Penelope’s insights this week, I have a few ideas to go on: people suck at predicting what will make them happy, the best way to see if you like something is to try it, being lost is pretty normal for my age, and tying myself in a neurotic knot because I don’t know what to do with my life is useful to no one (I came up with that one all on my own!). So I’m starting my part-time job next week, and the week after that I’m going to start volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and the week after that…who knows. Maybe I’ll have a little more figured out by then.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. PS – I know the last bit was a bit Penelope-heavy, but I so, so admire writers who can help you see your life from a new perspective. To me, that’s what good writing is all about…and someday, maybe I will join those ranks.

This weekend, I broke out the paints for the first time in a long while. I’d gotten so used to working with pixels and photographs that I forgot how psychologically different working with real, wet, messy media can be.

For one thing, mistakes on a computer are pretty much infinitely undoable. Try something out; if you don’t like it, CTRL-Z and it’s like it never happened. I use a lot of push and pull in terms of object transparency, making sure that each element plays nicely with the others. There’s no slider that says how opaque your paint is. You can’t move elements around until they’re exactly where you want them.

As I worked on my little piece, I observed my own feelings and reactions towards it. Reluctance to experiment on something I’d already put a few hours into, fear of screwing up the hard work I’d already done, the “oh, shit” feeling when something failed miserably.

In painting, mistakes happen. I don’t care who you are. The difference between a painting mistake and a Photoshop mistake is that you have to take that mistake and transform it into something else. You can’t pretend it never happened, because there it is, mucking up your canvas. Rather than stepping back, you have to go deeper and find out what could possibly be valuable about the hot mess of pthalocyanine blue that’s smeared all over your precious canvas like a mutant brain (just for example). In my case it was that nail polish remover (i.e. acetone) can remove a good deal of acrylic paint that you don’t want to be there, but it can also melt together the bristles of your synthetic brushes. I ended up with a nice texture, though.

Not to get too philosophical about it, but I’ve been living my life in a very Photoshopped way since I moved to STL. Cautiously, timidly, not putting anything out there that I couldn’t immediately take back and pretend never was. Not getting messy. Living in a world of my own construction, rather than the one that IS.

Even though it happens in Photoshop occasionally, the thing that rewards risk-taking artists is the “happy accident.” The thing you couldn’t predict, couldn’t plan for, and possibly couldn’t replicate ends up being the one thing that unifies the whole piece or bumps it up from competent to transcendent. Every artist I know is thrilled about happy accidents, but rarely do they get to that point without making a few shitty accidents along the way.

I’m not breaking new ground here, just making a few observations that came up for me this weekend. Thinking about what it would be like to live a more painterly life. Wondering what happy accidents might come my way if I did.