Lost and Found (Time, That Is)

Have you ever told yourself that you’d do more art if you could only find the time? I say this frequently. Where is that lost time? If it’s not under the bed, under the chair, up on a shelf, or behind the door, then where has it gone? Chances are it’s right there with us, wherever we are.

I think I’ll check my desk chair in the office, where I go with my coffee every morning and surf the web. It’s all legitimate, of course. I call it “art research” or “website maintenance” or “marketing” or “catching up with family and friends” on social media. But if I faced the truth, I would have to admit that there are many rabbit holes and shiny things that catch my attention and keep me there way too long. That has to be the place where all my lost time is, because it’s not spent sitting in front of the TV. I have stopped watching TV at all, except for evenings after dinner with my husband. And even that only has half my attention; I’m mostly there for together time. (Well, I guess technically you could call that potential “found time,” because there is the opportunity to use that time for sketching or doing a small collage or two as I multi-task in front of said TV.)

So yep, there it is. I found my lost time. It was in my chair!

I don’t even want to contemplate how much time is spent not doing art that could just as easily be spent doing art, or marketing that art. Not today. Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow.

But in the meantime, something rather extraordinary happened the other morning — I think it was Christmas Eve. I decided to sneak into the studio for a little while to do a collage or two. It was an urge, a compulsion, an irresistible force. I had to work fast, because it was going to be a busy day. Usually this is a recipe for failure, because no artist wants to be rushed. But something happened, and I can’t explain it except to say that things just seemed to work for me that morning. I was able to create several small collages, one right after another, that I consider to be successful. The only explanation I have is that I had spent a couple of days prior to that creating some new painted collage papers. So maybe it was the anticipation of using those new papers.

It all started with the one collage shown here. It’s a ghost of a previously-rejected collage, with just one or two new touches. The transformation worked well. That one got me into the flow of working on several more.

Getting them all scanned took almost as long over the past three days as  it took to create them in the first place. But I’m happy with all of them. I’ll be sharing them in future posts.

Lost and Found – Collage, 6×8″ on 8×10″ backing