Staycation Success!

Well, I did it.  One successful week staycation (thanks to Cindy and Elisabeth  who made me familiar with the term).  Vacation at home.  I didn’t blog for six whole days and only sporadically checked my email.  Jon and I saw 4 movies (Anchor Man 2 was my favorite, Jon told me that at times I was the only one laughing in the theater). I’m almost done reading  Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch (can’t wait to get done blogging so I can get back to it, I’m hooked) walked with Lenore in the woods,  slept late, visited Jon’s sister and had a very special New Years with friends. (I’ll write more about that later, it included a 2014 Tarot card reading).

It was  all delightful and restful and today I couldn’t wait to get into my studio and do that cleanup that I wrote about.  I folded and organized and re-homed and threw out a big black bag full of garbage.  I shook out my rugs and swept under the furniture.  I can easily see making this a winter ritual, stay-cation between Christmas and New Years with a clean up on New Years Day.

One of the unexpected things that happened over the past week was that I found myself drawing almost every day.  I started drawing when Jon and I first got together.  When we were driving and he would stop to take pictures, I would draw.  I think I started doing it because I didn’t want to just be sitting in the car waiting for him.  Waiting makes me anxious and I was very conscious of wanting to encourage Jon’s photography.  I wanted him to take pictures when he wanted to, for as long as he wanted to, and not feel pressure from me.  I didn’t want him getting back in the car and me being all pissed off from waiting around.  So I started drawing.  I drew what was in front of me.  Mostly, roads and telephone poles and barns and farm houses.  After a while Jon and I would just drive around so he could take pictures and I could draw.  That was six years ago.

In between then and now, I’ve done lots of drawing.  Some with my free motion sewing machine, and some pencil and paper.   The pencil and paper are mostly farm scenes from the road and interior scenes.  I’m drawn to the everyday, those things that are right in front of me.  But when Jon and I were in New Jersey a couple of months ago for his TED Talk, I did some different drawings while listening to 5 hours of TED Talks. They were a direct emotional reaction to what I was hearing and experiencing (once again drawing what was in front of me, only different).  But they were a combination of my regular pencil and paper drawings and the Streaming pieces I do on my sewing machine.

And it was this type of drawing I found myself doing this past week.  A combination of what I was feeling and what I was seeing right in front of me.  And they felt necessary to me.  Like I had these ideas and feelings I needed to express and this was the perfect medium for that self-expression.

These drawings are a combination of all I’ve been doing for the past 6 years.  They are born out of all the work I have done to this point, including writing on my blog, which has taught me to go deep inside of myself and access and write about my feelings in a way I’ve never done before.  So there is my history is in them, but the immediacy of the moment too.  Most of the interior scenes come directly from our house and the rest comes from somewhere inside of me.

I sold one of these drawings before Christmas and decided to sell more if there is a desire for them. I’ll post them on my blog tomorrow and see how it goes.  But no matter what happens, I don’t see me stopping anytime soon.