finding your place

When you go back to research, you have to rebuild the structure of ideas - it's fallen down, the bits are all over the floor. You have to read, and think, and let the connections be made, let the structure re-form. It takes time. There are long periods of mess, everything in a fog.

When you go back to painting, it's the same, except that you don't have to read and think. You have to look and feel. Watch and wait. Let the shapes come out of your mind, some shadow place of emotion and being. Though, for me, it doesn't actually seem that the shapes come 'out of your mind', in that myth-of-creation way I talked about before. For me they come in the form of a response. The myth-of-creation says that the stuff arises mysteriously, flowing magically outwards from within. My experience of creation, however, is that something in the world comes to my attention, or back to my attention. It's my attention that changes. The stuff is outside, not inside.

Instead of reading and waiting, you can do and wait, or look and wait. It seems so obvious, now that I'm doing again, that the non-doing has to be within the doing. And yet, I also don't entirely agree with myself. Periods of incubation, of other kinds of being, still seem to be as important a part of it all.