I have always been a messy person. I've always had trouble organizing and managing things outside of my head. When I was a little kid in school, my desk, bookbag, cubbyhole were always the messiest of the girls' in my class of thirty, though there were always boys who were worse than me. I would lose crayons, pencils and erasers and have to scrounge supplies from I don't remember where. I just remember the motley stuff I ended up with--random broken crayons, pencils disgustingly full of someone else's tooth marks. My nice cap erasers would be long gone, so I would bite the metal ring around the worn down pencil eraser to make it stick out enough to erase a little. I would look at other kids' tidy, full boxes of supplies and wonder how they managed to keep them so nice, how they managed to keep them at all.
As I grew older I would go on cleaning binges, resolving that I would never be messy again. I loved the sensation of peace and clarity that came with a clean bookbag, a clean room, but I could never maintain it. I didn't know why. As a grownup, a mother of four no less, I continue to struggle, sometimes sinking beneath a deluge of mess, sometimes feeling more in control. Sometimes I have maintained a consistently ordered home by giving it my undivided emotional and mental attention, while squelching or derailing dominant aspects of my personality--dreaminess, prayerful contemplation, making pretty things with my hands. I now consider such complete attentiveness to maintaining outward order dangerous and self-destructive for me, so usually I clumsily juggle my responsibilities and aspirations, trying not to neglect either my inner or outer world too much but not doing anything as well as I want to.
Until the last few weeks. Perhaps I speak too soon, but I feel that I am finally figuring out how to maintain a consistently ordered outward life that does not suppress but enhances the inner life and creativity that is core to my identity. It's very simple, so simple it's a little embarrassing. Several times a day, I set a timer for ten minutes and work nice and fast on a category of mess. When the timer goes off, I set it again and work on something else. With the time limit, I don't get swallowed up in a single cleaning project that I complete but don't maintain. I have put boundaries around the cleaning and ordering part of my day, to make sure it doesn't overtake the creating part of my day, and I am happy to say I am getting more time in the studio without feeling so burdened by outer chaos, and I'm getting some parts of my life in order without the frustration and sadness I feel when I neglect my art.
From my kraft paper sketchbook:
Andrew Wyeth once said, "The great danger of the Pyle school is picture making." (His father and only teacher, the great illustrator N.C. Wyeth, was taught by illustrator Howard Pyle. Many great illustrators were taught by Howard Pyle.) I'm not sure I know what he meant, but I wonder if this painting might count as a "picture," an exquisitely observed picture of tree roots, a spring beauty blossom and a maroon and green-streaked skunk cabbage blossom. To me it does not have the charged, abstract power of his later works. Not that I miss it in this piece. Picture or not, I like this painting very much.
