At least, I hope so. The past week has been traumatic, as I lost touch with my web-site. Everything appears to be under control now. The past few days have seen another kind of attempt to rediscover sanity, in the form of the imposition of some kind of order on my collection of pictures and reference material.
For a long time now I have been becoming increasingly annoyed and frustrated by the difficulty I have experienced in finding items of work I wanted for exhibition, or some other purpose. Although I have been storing pictures on racks in the studio and in the spare bedroom there has not been a viable system of labelling them so that any item I wanted could be retrieved easily and quickly. Often the wrapped picture would have a label on the front, but the storage in racks meant that it was not possible to read these readily. Now I have ensured that everything is wrapped serviceably and a label-strip is fastened to the outer edge, so that it is not necessary to move the picture at all in order to identify it.
At the same time I have been conducting a certain amount of weeding, moving items in which I no longer have faith into another rack in the cellar, where the frame, and possibly a card mount, can be recycled. I can’t tell you how much this has boosted my morale. Of course, it really should have been done between January and the end of May, when I ran out of ideas for creative work, but better later than never!
Also today, I got round finally to sorting my plan-chest, in which I store unframed material. These have been ordered in drawers by subject-matter, but material has been stuffed into them quite uncritically, so that I have ended up with a high proportion of things which were either preliminary sketches, tentative experiments, or simply ideas which didn’t work. Only one of the drawers remains to be “cleansed” now, and that is the life-drawing stuff. I ought to manage to do this tomorrow. I have been astonished by the extent to which this ordering ritual has improved my morale, and compensated for the anger and frustration entailed by the mess-ruceup of my communications apparatus.
I celebrated this evening, while cooking dinner, with large doses of single malt whisky and Bruce Springsteen …. played very loudly! Together with the after-effects of a very good climbing trip to the North York Moors yesterday, I am beginning to feel almost normal. Let’s hope I can actually get back to some art.