I have talked around it, walked around it, ignored it, and pasted pennies on top of it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Anything but Art.<\/p>\n
There. I said it. I’m not painting, and I’m not drawing, and I don’t know why.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And yet all I’ve drawn were two flash sketches of people on the commute into Atlanta. Maybe 15 minutes, tops.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But somehow I didn’t find time to draw.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What happened to me?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But suddenly, this two-month drought.<\/p>\n
Is my well of creativity so shallow that this blog and the goofy penny photos consumed it?<\/p>\n
Am I just getting old, steadily losing those hormones that energize you and activate your brain and body?<\/p>\n
Did I just need to have the kind of summer that normal people have – with fun, friends, and doing nothing?<\/p>\n
Is it part of a greater malaise? Or the boredom that nips at my heels unless I am running full-out?<\/p>\n
I hope I figure it out, and soon. Because otherwise, I will wake up in a year with a very major case of regret.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … read more Day 47: The elephant in the room<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[158,35,161,160,159,62],"class_list":["post-5298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-158","tag-art","tag-drawing","tag-painting","tag-regret","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5298"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5303,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298\/revisions\/5303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}