As I’ve noted on several occasions, the purpose of this blog is to give readers some idea of the life of an artist, and in particular the ways in which the art bit relates to other things in life. Well, you do need to know that it is not all creative excitement, and there are parts of the “art” bit that can be downright boring, even if they are necessary.
I am hoping to get out to collect some reference material “in the field”, as I have a couple of potential compositions in mind now. Apart from the fact that my wife needed my assistance with a shopping trip to Halifax today it has been windy and intermittently raining. So, while she went off on a family visit this afternoon I was left alone in the house. I decided (with an enormous surge of the feeling of virtue) to do some weeding of my art files. This long-overdue task has come to be quite pressing as both of the drawers devoted to my art activities in the filing cabinet had reached a point at which it was difficult to find anything, or more particularly, to find room for anything. I managed to weed one of them. The other will have to wait for a similar opportunity.
I suppose that artists are, in this respect, just like everyone else. When a task is finished the paper-work involved is bundled together in a file, and it is pushed into the filing cabinet where it sits undisturbed for a limitless amount of time. Paper-work is governed by the same principle that governs everything else …. “You never know when it will come in useful.” On the basis of this afternoon’s experience I can tell you that, at its most optimistic, probably less than a half of the paper you store will ever be of interest of use to anybody ever again.
This sorting/weeding job is not all tedious grind. It is nice to be reminded again of things I have done, especially those things that were received well. It is also interesting to rediscover former projects which never actually came to anything. Is there still something to be made of them? I’m toying, once again, with the idea on which I did quite a lot of preliminary work about a year ago, around the Faust stories. I’m reluctant to believe that this is not worth another period of engagement. We shall see.