Fires and Boxes of Tissues

A lot has happened in the bosom of the Gomez clan.

As I spend my office hours in the doctor's surgery downstairs type type typing away and recording the deepest despair of mental illness in cool, clinical language, my family upstairs has exploded. The phone calls began and this contagion of bewildering tragedy suddenly splintered across the Atlantic and the Irish sea to afflict more Gomez's. The as-of-yet un-scathed Gomez's across the globe board up their windows and hope to wait out this hereditary plague.

When personal tragedy and hardship hits families, as is inevitable, it hits them like a tsunami; hard, heavy, and one thrashing wave after the another. Then it leaves the residual flooding, the electric fires, the power outages and a major life readjustment.

And yet, somehow, when things seem so desperate and numbing, there are straws to be clutched at.

My artistic flame has kept alight. In fact, against all sense of decency, it has ignited. Like a firecracker.

I know these aren't firecrackers, but it's a Halloween-irony thing

The thing is that I don't struggle to get my creativity going anymore. At all. This is incrediby hard for me to believe. I really accepted for a while there that the fairy muses had finally given up on me. I wouldn't blame them; my decision to study Corporate Law probably didn't do anything to make them feel welcome. I was very much the lost cause of art inspiration. I sat through a few years of Art Soc classes sitting at my sketchpad like a zombie, supressing low squirmings of jealousy like maggots inside my gut. I eventually stopped attending them entirely and dabbled with the Arts Admin side of things instead.

Now, anything gives me ideas. Markings on the wooden floor, bites of the news, splinters of sentances, jewelery on a news reader's neck, flashes of scenery out of the car window, the shape of someone's nose, flies caught in the lamps, shreds of tissue in the washing machine, half collated fragments of memories, the shape of a box...

When I have a moment of repose, like when I sit on the bus for a consolatory Galway visit, the ideas just pour out and explode and sizzle and evolve over and over. For hours. I can't keep up with it.

The glorious Feda Bus from Donegal to Galway. Four hours of boring? Not anymore.

I am constantly reaching for my phone to record slivers of ideas, stories and dialogues in my drafts folder (of course, about 30% of these ideas are pure brilliance, the other 70% are strange, questionable shite). When I squeeze my mobile back into my skinny jean pocket, I will have invariably thought of another entirely unconnected idea and have to squrim all over the seat to maneouver it back out again. Derp.

I'm having a genuine Degas moment, in the sense that I'm falling in love with everyday life. It's like being a child again. There are stories spilling out from under the doorframes, whilst the sadness barks in through the windows.I will definitely have to research this as it feels like a definite phenomena - shock to the system induces long-anticipated art attack? I won't like what this already seems to suggest.

Before deciding that moving back was more financially viable, I had seriously considered a good stint of hermitage. Cezanne style, in the middle of Beautiful Fucking No-Where. I came home to discover the origins of my artistic process, to get the addiction back and let the bug bite and drink deep. Cezanne painted glorious rocks and fruit, space and dimension. The good, hard stuff of being. I will have to be like water.

The Gomez family explosion continues unabated. I feel a little like I'm 16 again, blocaded under the stairs, listening to power metal, and scribbling away furiously out of my Buffy comics to cope with the anxiety of the formative years. There is now a strong sense of powerlessness that pervades everything.

I am always less powerless when I am arting.

The momentum has started, for both ideas, and arting, and art blogging. The synapses are firing and glowing urgently.

So I keep filing, making labels, calling solicitors and trying to be cool and professional (they could employ me one day, better look good, the dreary and boring Heron says), making appointments and keeping the box of tissues stocked. In the office and in the house. I will keep being here for the Gomez's.

Whilst the mugs of tea pile up, I will keep gratefully idea gathering. The fairy muses are being generous to me now. The planting and harvesting of the finished products, however, will have to lay in wait. I trust that Gods of Diligence will appear in a shower of stars and toss me into the field with my arting boots on when the time is right.

(You are absolutely welcome for that Ted talk link btw. And you thought the Ken Robinson one was good? Pah!)

One of those work in progress. Massive antipation towards inkscaping it.  Never stop believing!