02/25/2021
Sometimes being an artist and a business are in opposition with one another. Sometimes being a new mom, and an artist, and a business, are all in major conflict with one another. February has been so much of that. Despite all my best plans, efforts, intentions, goal setting, and everything else my “business” and the world say to do, NONE of it worked. It was one crises after another, chaos outside my control- issues with applying for PPP loans, issues with sick employees, issues with our furnace at home, struggling with personal health issues and postpartum depression. It’s been ugly. Trying to reinvent my business and relaunch my Etsy and wholesale channels not only hasn’t happened, but after drawing the Tower card in the tarot, I’ve realized it won’t happen for awhile. Things are crashing, shifting, systems no longer functioning.
In ’s book “Big Magic,” she has the following quote: “possessing a creative mind is somewhat like having a border collie for a pet; you must give it a job to do, or it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.”
New motherhood and constant new heaps of chaos, with no hope of childcare help in sight, means I’ve been doing fragmented poor work, unable to scrap together more than 10 minutes at once, and only getting to the most essential and emergent of tasks with my other business responsibilities and being a new mom. Instead of business work punctuated by focus blocks to create, it’s little shreds of time here and there, panic induced and the worst of my brain after an exhausted day of mom-ing, trying to scramble through the must-do tasks that others are counting on me to do. And no time leftover to try to keep up on orders for this business, let alone updating an Etsy, pricing, colors, and all the other things I need to do to create the cohesion and style that I pride myself for in this brand.
But, I need to make something, anything, or else my brain is like a bad bored border collie that will surely eat the couch or p**p on the floor. I feel deep sadness and anger if I don’t make something to get it out. My heart has been drawn to surface treatments, tactile and texture again.
So I’ve started making these fabric “paintings.” Collage meets quilts meets painting. Processing what to do with my brand, my pride and craft that I invested so long in, and now seems impossible to resurrect and robbed by this pandemic and motherhood looking absolutely nothing like I planned. Facing the worst of of what I feared and tried with every ounce to avoid, of being a mom destroying my art life. Processing grief and anger at fu***ng COVID, and how it’s wrecked my life and my work and how pi**ed I am every time I see someone go on unnecessary vacations and flouting safety precautions and dragging this endless hell out into eternity for all of us that are considered “nonessential” and all the kids that won’t be vaccinated for years. God i hate that term “nonessential” and find it to be so repulsive. I am so sick of zoom calls and anxiety over the rare times that I need to reach out to a friend for some in person socialization for fear I might otherwise snap. And I’m most sick and sad watching my little brand sit on ice, frozen like Han Solo in the slug’s lair.
So I stitch, and process. Like those old programs that we used to run on those ancient PC’s, the “defrag” cycle, I am defragging my studio, processing through scraps and bits in my scraps and bits of time, waiting for something to give, whether that’s winter giving way to spring, infection giving way to herd immunity, isolated parenthood giving way to the distant dreams of what is currently lost collaborative community.
I defrag my brain and my heart and my space, trying to create something out of nothing, make sense of the senseless, until some meaning and order and structure re-emerges out of the chaos of destruction in the future.
That’s sometimes what it is to be a business owner in opposition to an artist. When circumstances and money and business cannot stand, only art can spring out of the rubble.
