JANUARY

…and a curse of clean slate.

Who doesn’t love the endless possibilities of clean slate, empty page, virgin canvas, a freshly stretched embroidery hoop?

Yours truly. I hate it thoroughly.

Reassuring myself that I will not get intimidated by clean and not crowded work table and freshly vacuumed floors in my studio I’m sitting in my chair staring out the window at my frozen garden. It’s my first day back after two weeks of break when I took all my sorrows and all my troubles and dumped them into ocean…now they’re back, apparently.

I’m at my best in the middle of process, figuring out details and ways to get things from amorphous ideas floating around in my head into 3d reality. I love having things scattered over every horizontal surface of my little studio - velvets, tapestries, embroidery floss, threads, beads, broken rosaries, things in little dishes topped by other things in even smaller dishes balancing on the edge of work table, pieces of trim hanging off the lamp stand by my chair, reference books everywhere. Now I don’t have this busyness, my support cast. Clean slate means clean mind, the flow of ideas is halted, all the visual clues removed.

My little studio on winter morning

Of course, the slate is never really clean. There are scribbles on the butcher paper I cover my table with, some are barely visible anymore like hieroglyphics of ancients, and some fresher, only weeks old. I’m trying to read: “discarded pieces of me”, “time in winter spins backwards” - what was going through my mind? I think. But there are breadcrumbs: sketches in my notebook, notes on my phone, first one reads: “Every real teacher is myself in disguise”, well, this helps tremendously.

The only thing I didn’t tackle yet in my feverish fit of studio cleaning is antique jewelry display cabinet that stretches along one wall of my studio. This is where i keep all my finished commissions, works-in-progress, some pieces that I kept for various reasons, and my collection of antique pincushions. I know i need all the space in it as I’m starting to work on my solo show, this year with Beinart Gallery in Melbourne. Im toying with idea of studio sale, something I almost never do, but I really do need all the space, it’s going to be a very busy year.

So here is to the new beginnings, to fresh start, however uncertain, and clean slate, and virgin canvas. We’ve came a long way, and we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve gathered ideas, and soon we start putting them on paper, on canvas, on fabric, type them on our screens and write them in our journals. New year is here, and we’re here, and winter wont last forever, and the stirring deep inside will become embroidery, sculpture, painting, perhaps even a book. To show world that we are, we were, and we always will be, creators.

Until February, XOXO

Larysa