We are both up. He has started the coffee and is unloading the dishwasher. Today - I’m finishing the Beauty sleeve. Because I’m up early, I think I can do 30 minutes of journal transcribing. I’m doing the summer I turned 40, The Golden Notebook.
But they don’t you know and here I am with both hands high under the skirts of the world. Trying to figure it out.
Everything rearranged itself from is to was. The white moon tracks her silver self across the purple night replacing time with a celestial hour glass.
Al Purdy
The way it is with children.
Then in the swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
Streaming through widening channels into the open sea.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours
Just be an artist.
Live in a kind of regime.
Manage the time you are given.
One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come agian. For it is not yet the memories themselves.
Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes from them.
Rainer Maria Rilke - blood remembering
to make without a firm plan
these little squares of colour lead me. I place them next to each other, and then listen to hear how they like their neighbours
I notice how they each have a presence, whether bold or quiet, and how the diagonal pathsthey make either blend in with others to create a firm yet gentle ground, or stand out boldly and are perhaps too loud
I have to wait until more colours go up
sometimes there is too much darkness and greyness. how did that happen? I am still the boss
I want to make something brave, not sad. I often have to un-pick and re-sew.
The bravery of these colours, and these neat square shapes hand-sewn one to the other.
These colours and their paths are the subject today. The SUBJECTS.
The object I end up with deals with these subjects, and that's all it does.
And while I sew them, I listen to the book about animal rights and astrology.
(Journal entry today)
Artwork is a working through of disappointments and a growing recognition of failure to the point of defeat. But still we wake up, and there is inspiration, and we go on.
Be defeated. Carry on. Agnes Martin
