I am looking out of the window, and there are my tables, all empty. Last night I cleaned up my outdoors paper studio. Since June I have been working there, almost every day, seven days a week. It has been a flow, and I have been totally focused. We also had a really hot summer, and staying under the roof, in the shadow, was just perfect.
Everything else has been put on hold…till fall…till winter…till whenever the weather and the temperatures would force me indoors, to hibernate for the winter. I admit, recently it has been quite cold. With hands in cold water, and winds, even temperatures around 10 degrees Celsius feels cold. But I did not care. As long as I could let paper fibres float in water to create paintings I could not do any other way, I was totally happy. In the beginning of June artist Maya Cannon from Tokyo came to visit, and she helped me setting it all up. Since then I have adjusted and rearranged details to fit my needs, and now I have “the perfect outdoor paper studio”. Hurray!
Maya in the preparations, with buckets filled with my old prints ground into small pieces and fibres.
We had three great weeks together, changing between indoor work in my print studio, and outdoors in the paper studio. Thank you Maya for being such a great visitor, friend and colleague.
And now I am sad. And I am content. Always a mix. Happy to have been on this journey, happy to be ready for Ferdinand MyPress making prints, but sad to leave the flow. Taking a look at yesterdays works I am thinking, “well, there was something new there, something I could have followed up…but now it is too late”… Or? Definitely not. I did not finish blogging about my Awagami Factory residency. Planned to, but was caught up by this strong flow. Now I do not have to look upon the stay as history. More like the start. My outdoors studio journey has been the interlude, and in March there will be an Awagami follow up. So I regard my work here as the preparations for the adventure to come.
