The Artist-Wanderer's Dance

The girl who mistook the sun for a rather fetching hat © Cherry Jeffs 2011
40 x 30cm, Natural pigments, tea and other media on hardboard.

I'm a nomad. But I keep getting sucked into thinking I shouldn't be. Trying to hold myself down.

My subconscious figures that if it can weigh me down with enough bricks or land, I won't be able to move. But sooner or later I find a way to wriggle out from under again.

"To someone more deeply rooted, even to the traveler, he appears to be always in flight...
The journeyer is at home while underway, at home on the road itself, the road being understood not as a connection between two definite points on the earth's surface, but as a particular world."​
Symbol Reader

​Maybe it’s the extreme oppositions in my birth chart that make me swing from one extreme to the other. Kind of a binge and purge accumulation disorder.

I’m hoping that this time I’ve learnt my lesson and I’m never going to gorge myself on anchored acquisition again.

"But what happens when your house is finished? And now you have to be happy. You have no excuses. A new floor, a new room, isn’t going to save you."
Howard Mansfield - Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter

​My equally-restless other half and I are beginning another journey. We've done it countless times before. We're divesting ourselves of a large percentage of what we've acquired during this preceding sedentary period. We're mostly giving it away or recycling it. Quite frankly, a lot of it is junk.

The beginning of this downsizing process always feels overwhelming and traumatic. How to decide what to ditch and what to keep? How can I live without...?(FILL IN THE BLANK.)

But once underway it starts to feel easier, exciting even. I shake my head in disbelief at the sheer amount of STUFF it's possible for two fairly frugal people to collect in a relatively short space of time. 

(STUFF expands to fill the space available. You know, like when you get a new computer and you think you could never fill that seemingly-huge, empty hard-drive? Then incrementally but inexorably the space starts to disappear.)

At least I won't have to put up with this any more: The Leak in the Studio © Cherry Jeffs 2011
21 x 29 cm, Pencil on recycled paper

With each clearance box that hits the hallway, my soul feels lighter. My feet begin to try out the almost-forgotten steps of the wanderer's dance.

Of course, I’m going to miss my studio. A lot.
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"I pulled out an old oil paint box from when I was in art school...Portable. I could create anywhere...How did this simple box morph into an entire room filled with containers of things that I don’t even use? I suppose I know the answer to that, the irony here is that when you are in art school you long for a studio that is all your own, one that you can fill with blank paper, canvas, and endless tubes of paint."

Keri Smith

But I know I don’t need half so much stuff as I think I do to create. Over the next year, I’m going to figure out just what I do need. And what I never notice isn’t there. 

I'm putting together a Portable Art Studio.

My creative routines are well established. I’m confident I can create anywhere with whatever I can lay my hands on. 

In fact with each item I get rid of, it feels like I'm making more space in which to create: art, adventures, new relationships and experiences. 

Oh yes, my feet are definitely remembering the steps of that wanderer's dance ;)

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You might also like to read about how downsizing your workspace can hone your creative voice.
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