The mid-January slump has hit me hard, and motivation is hard to come by. Although I should be filling my time not at work or asleep with productive and creative things, I am in reality sneaking off to read novels and catch the occasional five o’clock nap.
Painting has to wait for the spring, it’s too cold and damp to sit in my workroom; but there are hundreds of other jobs I could, I should be getting on with. Most of them make me stick out my bottom lip and mutter ‘don’t want to…’, or roll my eyes and ask ‘What’s the POINT?’, like a teenager but with way less collagen.
The work I have done is finishing pieces, printing a small run of a two-plate print with Chine colle (SO fiddly, trying to put glued paper on an inked plate without sticking or smearing); finishing a picture I started in the Spring.
It’s working out what to do next that’s the problem. I need a plan. There are prints to make, because I have lino to use up and it doesn’t keep – but of what? Plenty of printed paper to collage, if I could only feel like it. Canvases to recycle, photographs to sort and edit, plans to make and projects to construct . Nothing so far has dredged up any enthusiasm, without which there is no point to doing any of it.
It’s part of life, with art, to feel constrained or unwilling or just bored; but it’s the hard part. It often comes in the depth of winter, when we’re tired and waking in the dark. I hope that as the light returns, so will a sense of purpose. Until then, I keep going through the motions, as the cold makes my bones ache and reminds me that there is so much to do, and always less time to do it.