Drought Alleyway

The following purple stuff is directly lifted from the Robert Genn newsletter today, about working in a studio.  I'm a bit better today, my coughing doesn't double me over in death throes nearly as much, and TY gave me some decongestant for allergies that the pharmacist suggested and it works beautifully. That and going to bed at 7:30 and sleeping until 7 AM seems to have brought me back to the living.  I even threw in a load of laundry am am listening to it gurgle and swirl as I type.  Getting back to normal here after a bad patch.  Besides, it's going to be New Years Eve and I have to get ready to doze through it as is my tradition.   Occupy art studio December 30, 2011 Dear Sandy, Living in a tent city in a public park in the middle of winter had its benefits. Besides the persistent action in the next tent, one got to learn the relative warmth of sleeping bags, use of ear plugs, and how to handle a fire extinguisher. Then there was the pre-dawn police lecture on lawn care. A subscriber wrote, "Six hundred occupiers are now in jail, but not one single shiny-suit banker, and now I'm under the basement stairs, looking for a better painting and a better year ahead." Sounds like a plan. No matter how modest, that studio is both the workroom and the playroom--and with the addition of a computer, the situation-room. (ed. comment: how true)But the main idea in the studio is to raise quality beyond the 99 percent of average artists out there, and join up with the top one percent. It doesn't take much of a studio. "The studio is less important than other things, like the burning desire to paint," says Warren Criswell. "If you don't have this disease, you can't catch it from a nice studio." The studio is where you catch the disease, all right, and you catch it by following your nose around the place. Not entering the studio is worse than sneezing in the rain outside the MOMA. You have to pretty well show up and get inside. In the words of acclaimed author  Annie Dillard, "You need a room with no view so imagination can meet memory in the dark." The studio is an extension of the sandbox and the kindergarten playroom. It has a dynamic unlike any office or factory. It's a room at the service of a dreamer on her way to becoming a master. Wandering from project to project, she moves in a private soup kitchen where there's always something on simmer. With something to get on with--something to finish, something to start--even the tiniest of workrooms has within it the building blocks of talent. Stay out on the streets at your peril. Best regards, Robert All is well with me. The rain doesn't reach me, my room is well heated, what more can one ask for? There's no shortage of work, either.  Paul Klee

So today maybe I can get more accomplished than watching sit-com reruns on Hulu.  Guess maybe that Hulu is too much rampant imagination from odd sources so today it's back to NPR.  No view there so MY imagination can readily meet memory!  How novel.  Thanks, Annie.