Day 47: The elephant in the room

I have talked around it, walked around it, ignored it, and pasted pennies on top of it.

All day today I found ways to do anything but that: I would rather cook, clean the kitchen, shop, go to Costco, and test couches at the furniture store.

Anything but Art.

There. I said it. I’m not painting, and I’m not drawing, and I don’t know why.

This is the rare time of the year, in July and August, when I had the most free time. Tom is also very busy with his new job, so I have even more time to myself.

And yet all I’ve drawn were two flash sketches of people on the commute into Atlanta. Maybe 15 minutes, tops.

In these two months, I found the time to set up this website and write 46 blog posts with accompanying photos, I reviewed books written by my friends, I read old magazines, I crossed a dozen trivial tasks off my to-do list. I took a 10-day vacation. I found time to exercise, to sleep 8 hours a night, to harvest my herbs and make my own kombucha and pickles.

But somehow I didn’t find time to draw.

In the previous two years, at some of my busiest times on the job, I drew almost every day. I had spells where I got up at 5 a.m., in the dark and even on the coldest days, even after just six hours of sleep, so that I had time to draw before I went to my office at 8 a.m.

Yet this summer I slept in, had leisurely breakfasts, and read Facebook before easing into my work chair at 9. And didn’t pick up a pencil.

What happened to me?

It has happened before, these ups and downs with art. The pauses in between were, for the previous five years, becoming less frequent and shorter.

But suddenly, this two-month drought.

Is my well of creativity so shallow that this blog and the goofy penny photos consumed it?

Am I just getting old, steadily losing those hormones that energize you and activate your brain and body?

Did I just need to have the kind of summer that normal people have – with fun, friends, and doing nothing?

Is it part of a greater malaise? Or the boredom that nips at my heels unless I am running full-out?

I hope I figure it out, and soon. Because otherwise, I will wake up in a year with a very major case of regret.

Today’s penny is a corroded 1986 D, because I think that is the year I took my first art workshop, in Sumi painting. And I regret all the Days in the past 29 years that I didn’t do art.