At Home

From the “Work in Progress” blog series

Gale warning until Sun 9 PM. Rain 100% now through 10 PM

I hear it outside—rain, wind, a crash. Then my lights, clock, cable box, modem all shut down. I don’t like the diminished access.   

The wind pushes harder, and palm leaves bend, as if trying to touch the grass. Rainwater pouring from the roof is wet wind. It blows across the sliding door, flying away instead of splashing onto the ground. 

My focus is on how I feel, as if what I want or don’t want could have an impact on or might change the fact that at 9:49 AM my home feels like 5 PM. It’s overcast inside and colder than it is outside. 

I read Martin Gayford and David Hockney’s Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. 

With so many glass doors and large windows, this house is a livable greenhouse when the sun is bright. Now it’s more like being inside a light bulb turned off; a glass cloud cover darkens everything. 

I check my phone, battery 53%. I’ve taken 869 steps, about 11,131 less than usual, to get water, clean the cat box, brush my teeth, wipe the kitchen counter, find a sweatshirt. With no power and the riotous rain, the farthest I might walk the rest of the day is outside, under the eaves of the roof, to the recycling bin. 

I have a blanket and Alice, the cat, resting beside me. Every time I move, she jumps up and heads to her bowls  to check for food or water then to the atrium door—to confirm the weather outside--before she returns. I’d make tea, but I can’t heat water. I want to eat but want more to keep what is in the refrigerator cold (at least cool), so I don’t open the door. The  food in the freezer is already defrosting, so I take out ice cream and eat it with granola, then later eat it again with mixed nuts and more granola. 

It’s hard to settle. PG&E sends a text: crew expected onsite by 2:12 PM, 104 houses affected. It seems our neighborhood and a larger one just beyond us are involuntarily off the grid. 

Wind slaps against the house. It is louder than the rain, which is insistent but constrained. The wind chimes in the atrium make bumpy, irregular sounds.  I keep thinking the voice I hear from the other room is from the television, but it is only the storm in a conversation of its own. 

David Hockey says of La Grande Cour, his old farmhouse/studio in Normandy, “Right now, I need to be somewhere like this. When I signed the lease on Bridlington studio a decade ago I felt twenty years younger, and the same thing happened here. I feel revitalized. It’s given me a new lease on life.”

I have been procrastinating for a while. I have been making other “pictures,” to use a Hockney phrase for his work. I’ve been writing and revising scenes in another project and hoped something from the process would spark a new piece for this series. The insights I’m acquiring are ones I’m still integrating—new ideas on how a scene is a story and also much more, a moment and a story within a story—how to create knowing that? I couldn’t settle into that question or any other; I couldn’t initiate anything new. 

Then David Hockney helped me reconnect to the importance of feeling at home--being able to create a moment of home inside the body, inside the mind, in whatever space is available. It’s the awareness of that moment, I’m realizing, that is the thing to settle into. I sense it is what allows creating/art-making to take place. The story--the larger context—can be available to me, but finding or creating a sense of home within myself, is that what I need to make art from them? 

I love David Hockney because he draws me into his love of making pictures and where and how he works. Yet I know that for many of us the space to make art is not (or cannot largely be) physical space but resides primarily inside us.

I live in a house that was big enough when I first got it and is now more space than I need (whatever that means).  The space has always been an inspiration to me. I had the fantasy when I moved here that the space would have the feel of an art gallery or 27 rue de Fleurus. I kept the walls white for all the art that I was sure I would hang on them. 

Then fifteen minutes into ownership, reality set in. The facts are—there are so many things I’ve never been able to do with or for this property—and there are many things that have not yet and may never get done here.

And yet, when I open the front door and step in or I sit in a chair and look out—when I watch the light move across the atrium and into the living spaces, the gallery is here. In my mind, there’s a place where art lives. 

The willingness to put aside all that isn’t—or that needs space and time—the willingness to sit in the dark (or partial dark) and let the world outside do its thing, while inside with words and images, hand and heart, I do mine—that’s the reminder that reading David Hockney has offered me. 

The rainwater is rising in the side yard. We cleared it out, raked away vines and leaves, so the water would have direct access to a drain, but the rain is too intense. The water is standing, not draining. The wind is quieter, less persistent, still distressing. 

The moment is what it is.

David Hockney says, “I think I’ve found a real paradise. The place is perfect for me right now. I’m less interested in what other people are doing. I’m just interested in my new work. I think I’m on the edge of something, a different way of drawing is coming through, and I can do it here.”

There may be a time when I leave this home or make another somewhere else. It might be a choice or the impact of reality or simply what seems right at the time. This white box of glass and wood I live in is right now available to me, but so is the space inside me. 

The electricity will stay off another twenty-four hours. Late in the evening, I’ll put a flashlight on my shoulder and will pull Spring Will Not Be Cancelled close to my face to see the page. David Hockney will say, “If you ask me where I live, I’d always say it’s wherever I happen to be,” and I’ll keep reading.

Please leap with me:

In this piece, more than others in this series, the essay and the “leap” intersect. The essay itself is partially a leap into the creative process, and in this “leap” section, some of what I say feels like it could become part of the essay. I feel like I’m wading through an unfinished renovation

Many years ago I created a work of text/image, Ten Not-So-Tangible-Tools for Writers, because I wanted to speak to my sense of why awareness of certain things could help writers more fully achieve their work. One of the tools was writing is being at home. So much can be said about having a room of one’s own or a David Hockney studio space. I think this can be important. For some it may be essential, but, as someone who has often needed to make do with what is available, I realized how important the studio inside us is—that the space we have to navigate to make art is ourselves. 

I’m intrigued by but don’t desire David Hockney’s space. I do love how it infuses his work. What I learn from him helps me to imagine what I need to make my work.

Once I gave up being a writer. I’d lost the emotional space to create. I’d lost—if I ever had one--my connection to meaning. I found my way back when, like Hockney, I took out a new lease. For me, it was not for land or physical space; it was to try to work with new materials in a new way. It was, as Hockney says, to be less interested in what others were doing and more interested in, more aware of my work. It was the willingness, not just to be working, but to be engaged. This shift did not actually turn me away from others; it reminded me to be even more curious about how and why they create, and it offered me a place within myself where I could [mostly] comfortably work.  “Mostly” feels important to note. It tells me I don’t require surety, but do look for reliability. Maybe that’s another leap?

What happens for you when you feel at home in your writing/art-making process? I hope you’ll let me know or send an image of what an art-making “home” is for you.  Instagram: @cindyshearer2