In my last newsletter I wrote about moments of awe, specifically eclipse-chasing and being open to the possibility of being amazed. In this newsletter I’m considering the opposite: the long stretches of space between eventfulness.
Annie Dillard says it best in a quote from her book The Writing Life:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Very often it feels as though I am racing towards a goal or some point in the future where I can finally be fully present. This can look like working towards a vacation or a residency, or finishing a day’s tasks in order to have a few precious moments to connect with loved ones, or time to paint for myself.
I’m extremely lucky to have a job I enjoy. That being said, it is still a means to an end. I organize workshops and teach classes so that I have the means to work on what I feel like I was put on this earth to do, which is to love what I love, and to explore the mysteries of life through making art.
Rarely do I consider the paintings I make for the classes I teach as part of my “personal practice.” I consider my personal practice to be work I would make and stuff I would do even if no one ever paid me. I do occasionally sell my paintings, but profit is never the intention. The intention is the process of making.
I paint, draw, sketch, and occasionally sculpt because there is some innate drive in me to do these things, and there always has been, the same way an orphaned beaver has the overwhelming instinct to build a dam despite no one ever instructing it to do so.
Currently my personal practice is not the breadwinner. So that’s the distinction: the work I do for a living vs. the work I do to live. Somehow in my mind they are separate. There are boundaries. But I’m starting to think that this compartmentalization is some weird construct I’ve made up in order to make sense of how I spend my time.
This month I taught a class called Mark Making: Monet’s Water Lilies, where we learned a bit about Impressionism and emulated Monet’s energetic, gestural brushstrokes in order to depict lily-filled ponds.
I regularly spend a great deal of time coming up with new class ideas, figuring out how to structure and execute them, creating the images for the workshops and doing relevant research. I went to MoMA for this one and took photos of Monet’s original paintings in order to study them for class, trying to figure out how to render an oil painting in watercolor.
Up close, the marks and brushstrokes are a spectacular mess. When I stand a couple inches away from Monet’s Water Lilies, I have no idea what I’m looking at. It’s just a big explosion of colors, lines, loops, and chaos. When I step back to take the whole thing in, it miraculously transforms into a lily pond, reflecting the sky at dusk.
It wasn’t until teaching this workshop that I realized life is the same. Our day-to-day lives are filled with small strokes, repetition, and sustained gestures. Up close it can seem random, monotonous, perhaps even meaningless. But the bigger picture is something much more cohesive, holistic, and clear. I can’t be sure that I will die thinking that my life made any collective sense, but looking back on the last 35 years I can see how all the little things have added up to something that feels more meaningful now.
How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. This isn’t to say that it’s fine to be complacent about going through the motions, but rather the opposite: it’s good to be mindful of where our time is being spent and whether or not we want to embrace these habits or change them. The moments that seem like small change on a regular basis can actually amount to a life savings. This isn’t a revelation or a profound epiphany by any means, but it can be hard to hold on to.
Personally I know I spend too much time scrolling, and when I think back on the passing months and years, I absolutely do not remember the time spent on social media or the hours spent behind a screen. But I do remember the people I’ve met, the moments shared with others, the activities I’ve done with my hands, and the things that engaged all my senses.
This helps me to see the work I do for a living as integral to my life as whole, and I’m learning to embrace it. I genuinely enjoy teaching, I’m grateful for the people I’ve met through workshops, and I love sharing the act of creating with others.
Maybe the work I do for a living and the work I do to live are, on some level, actually one and the same. And I’m sharing this with you in the hopes that we can all breathe more meaning and presence into the in-between moments, the miraculous mundane, the routine, and the spaces between awe and wonder.
I’ll leave you with a quote from The Goldfinch1 by Donna Tartt:
“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
Thanks for reading.
Love,
Melanie
PS: I’m teaching two virtual classes in June, feel free to join me for Shadow & Light on June 15th, and Millefiori Gardens on June 29th. You can view a list of my past workshops on my website, which I just updated for the first time in 7 million years.
You are receiving this because you either subscribed or I signed you up because I love you. You can read Constellations in the format of your choice: as a newsletter in your inbox, on the webpage, or on the Substack app.
This publication is free and I aim to keep it that way. It’s a labor of love to bring this to life, so if you enjoy it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll have my sincerest gratitude and the delight of knowing you’re supporting my work as an artist.
♥
I wish I could recommend this book because the writing is beautiful, but I also found it to be problematic, needlessly racist, and misogynistic. The quote comes from the penultimate page of the novel, which to me was its greatest takeaway.