Reconnected?

Maybe. My trust in my process is being rewarded as I am generally feeling much more positive and engaged with my art. The news of a new national lockdown and the impact that will have on my business caused a bit of a wobble this week but I am looking forward to each day spent in the studio and can feel my focus and drive returning.

The colour palette I am working with, and the choices I make when I am printing my breakdown screens, mean that I’m producing some fabrics in which the colours are quite vibrant and the marks very crisp and some fabrics were the colours are more muted and the marks less crisp. I had been using the whole collection of fabrics in my compositions but this week I had a ‘what if’ moment. It happened on a ‘bad’ day when the news was awful. Everything that could go wrong in the studio went wrong. Everything seemed endless and everything seemed tainted. Part of me wanted to lock up the studio and reach for the gin. But part of me thought what the heck Leah, do something with this! So I pulled out the more muted fabrics, started cutting strips and started randomly pinning fabric to my design wall. I worked later into the evening than normal. I didn’t know where I was going but, having spent the last few weeks submerged in ‘making’ I felt a level of confidence in what I was doing that I thought I had lost. A sense of connection.

But I recognise that my sense of connection to my work and my confidence in me as an artist is fragile. I need relearn my art practice, my art habit.

When I was still working in industry I set myself a target of 20 hours in the studio each weeks and was very disciplined about recording only those hours spent making art and supporting my art practice. I continued to track my hours when I started working full time in the studio but tracked all my activities - the teaching hours, the admin hours, the social media hours etc. I recorded my art hours but didn’t set any targets. Looking make this was a mistake because it allowed me to pat myself on the back for working long hours in the studio whilst avoiding the fact that I was going for long periods of time without making art.

So, from 1st January I am only recording those hours spent making art. I don’t need to record those hours spent doing other things - I take my business seriously and am always going to put in the hours needed. I have set myself a target of 20 hours per week. I know that if I am teaching a 5 day workshop I am very unlikely to fit in many hours (or even minutes!) making art but that will be balanced by periods when I am not teaching and can fit in many more hours. If I am to hit my target I will need to think about what I do when. I won’t be able to print fabric or use my design wall to compose my quilts during periods when I only have a few days between classes. Instead I need to always have pieces at the quilting stage … I can always move my sewing machine into our dining room if the studio is full of students.

Those of you who know me or who have been reading for a while will know that I am a fan of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art’. The idea that I should treat my art just like I treat my day job was one that made me set that original weekly target and gave me the discipline to follow through. I need to remember that now!