The End of Hiatus – Galvanization

Hello summer lovers and lovers of summer,

I’m trying to post regularly but it is difficult and I’ve been procrastinating. First of all, I’m not a writer, and I feel slightly pretentious expounding. I’m not driven to write anything except songs – those just come when they want to. I do not, however, long to blog. But, having made the decision to get bloggy for purely professional reasons, it is now necessary to come up with topics that seem relevant to the artistic process and can sustain more than a paragraph or two of my ramblings. So, for the past few weeks while I have been enjoying my self imposed exile from my palette and easel, I have been trying to brew up a picture of what my return to the studio will look like and what I might write about at the end of such a protracted break.  I dunno.  But I should be writing something, this I know.

The summer has been so full that it seems germane to explain, briefly at least, how a hiatus can so stubbornly persist.

A cousin of mine – I’ll eponymously call him ‘The Galvanizer’ – arrived for a stay of two weeks. We had not seen each other in almost four years. When the Galvanizer and I get together the bacchanalia dial goes to eleven and this reunion was no exception. We played music, drank good wine and beer, smoked too much, discussed things deep and shallow and above all, cooked damn fine food almost exclusively over open wood fires. There was feast after feast and everyone reeked of wood smoke. The culmination was a whole pig cooked Hawaiian style in a deep pit of coals for about 7 hours.

So, that obviously was not the right time for a return to the studio. We had guests after all. And a pig.

Now, our guests are gone, the pig is is in deep freeze (we could not eat the whole thing despite our best efforts to please Bacchus) and we are, Sarah and I, lightly stunned and slightly hungover. Suddenly it is September and we have a fridge full of leftovers to sort out.  Our garden is bursting at the seams with vegetables screaming to be harvested. Our twins are walking and our nearly four year old son asks ‘why?’ every two seconds. We need to finish the chicken coop. Life continues at a pace faster than we may always be comfortable with. The lovely illusion of summer is over and after a break from studio work and a summer full of family and friends, it is back to the larger reality. The reality is of course, that Sarah and I are both working artists and our only income is derived from selling the work we make. Luckily, despite my choice to abscond from the studio for a longer time than I had planned, we both love what we do and feel tremendous gratitude that it is possible at all. Sometimes though, you need to step away for awhile to be galvanized. You need to forget your routine to appreciate it again. At least I do.

Did I mention I’ll be offering limited edition prints very soon? Doing the final test prints now.

Also, check out my new site of doodles and drawings, marshakian.wordpress.com

Ok, back to work, dammit.

More sooner,

D