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The Golden Stations
My friend and fellow artist Joe Blodgett devised a system he calls “The 14 Golden Stations.” At the time he was concerned with procrastination and time wasting — conditions that attack some artists. It works this way: You need a clock or a watch with an hourly chime. On the hour changes — generally from 8am to 9pm — you make a one-word note in a journal accounting for what you catch yourself doing. For yesterday mine looked like this: Walking, emailing, painting, painting, varnishing, driving, dreaming, planning, painting, painting, reading, snoozing, painting, painting.
The Gruen transfer
The Cycladic island of Naxos is dotted with white, cube-shaped houses clumped along the hillside in spaced, diminishing line-ups or stacked in a town labyrinth, an ever-narrowing grid climbing to a cloudless, cerulean sky. The edges are hard and soft with flat, angular shadows creeping across the summer walls in warm and cool greys. Balance and function make room for eye-stretches, patterning and design glee. I’m a rubbernecker on the back of the quad bike, grabbing at shapes and inhaling feelings for future art meals.
Happiness
My studio is now silent. Visitors have evaporated to their own spaces. It’s late at night. The brush dashes here and there. Is it habit, addiction, pastime, a need to connect again? Why am I so absurdly happy? I’m thinking of Maya Angelou: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
Over the summer artists have written — out of the blue — to confide the nature of happiness. Although varied, many of the remarks spoke of a universal idea — along the lines of Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea: “Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves…