a flower every day

it’s a reoccurring theme for me:
(especially when working with diptychs)
often it is the space between 2 things
that i will find to contain the most meaning,
that feels the most poignant,
that embodies the most potential.
and once again,
this seems to be the case.

1 year later
“a flower every day”
remains an “unfinished” work
and the space created between the two drawings
seems palpable

throughout this blog,
i have written extensively about my initial expectations for/from this project
and how my experience with it evolved.

for quite some time it felt like
the being present,
the drawings,
the documentation, both written and photographic
would resolve in a mixed media presentation

now,
1 year later,
i am not so sure,
but over the past week
i have feel it necessary to revisit my experience
and to try to place the 3 months i spent in the atrium
along with the connected work in my studio
into some sort of context.

i started last saturday by putting the flower drawings back up in my studio

while making these drawings
i was most definitely concerned with creating a “product”
but now,
looking at them critically,
i feel they speak about process
i don’t feel they are necessarily “transformative” in and of themselves
and i don’t find them to be “finished works”
i can only see them in terms of being a journey back to the self.

this would have been inconceivable to me a year ago
but perhaps this realization
will ultimately be the biggest gift of the entire experience:
whatever it is that one might feel in the present
whatever one’s “truth” might be
may shift over time
and if there is to be growth,
it WILL shift.
but it is only by being present
that one can experience this
if one lives in the past, there will be disappointment
if one lives for one’s goals, there will only be expectations
but if one confronts
what actually exists in the present,
there will be grounding.

sunday i read through the accounts of my visits,
starting from (my) day 1
and i am immediately transported back in time

to when i made this little offering
and everything that happened after.

after reading just the accounts of my visits
i went through the rest of the posts,
which allowed for a very condensed image of the entire performance;
i can still access the intensity of the atrium,
the waiting,
the watching,
and my experiences sitting
but it feels as if much more than a year has passed,
or that all this occurred in some other time frame,
in some sort of parallel world.

(nb: it is not uncommon for me to have chunks of my life feel this way)

i am not sure where i stand with these drawings…
my daily process includes making a drawing from life every day
so that aspect of the project is on-going

I don’t know if i will pursue the concept
to work with the flower photographs from this time period
and create a mixed media piece
but i do know know
that 1 year later
my commitment and ability to inhabit the “being” part of my psyche
has grown considerably
and
this is huge.