In my last post I spoke of the art that I was creating pre-masters and how that had to change as I was working on completing my masters in education. In 2016 I had painted every day of the year, right up until July. I'd enrolled in St. Francis Xavier University as part of their Masters of Education- Curriculum and Instruction and I had to go to Antigonish, Nova Scotia for 1 month of in person instructions.
Antigonish is beautiful. The campus is full of brick buildings covered in ivy.
A short walk and you pass by evidence of a significant pride in heritage.
Every time I went downtown I was struck by the how cute this little town was. No way were buildings being painted these colours where I live.
And the ocean is right there with a little drive.
I also enjoyed wandering around taking pictures of houses. I have always liked old houses.
But I got distracted...
So once I started courses I just did not have the same time to create and paint. I would be working full time in the classroom, evenings were online courses (at least once a week) and weekends, sometimes all weekend, was finishing the assignments and readings from the previous week and writing. It was busy and exhausting.
I just did not have time to paint. A painting could take anywhere from several hours, or even days to complete. That was not happening and, in among all of the course work I had several basement floods and repairs to deal with. In the summer of 2017 we had a sewer back up that took out half of the basement. That same summer we discovered a leak in the basement wall so we had to dig a trench around the outside of the house to fix it. Then in March of 2018 we got a pinhole leak in one of the pipes of the main water valve, taking out the other half of the basement. Then in November of 2019 we had to deal with ground water flooding in our basement. All of this while taking classes and writing paper, a thesis proposal and ultimately my final thesis paper.
It wasn`t until early 2019 that I was able to start actually making things. I decided that I wanted to start making mugs and teapots. The nice thing about pottery was that I could finish each step of building a mug in about 15 minutes and actually feel like I got something accomplished. A painting can take hours but, each step of getting a mug put together can take me much less time. This was part of the first batch that I sold through Facebook.
I also started working on smaller artwork that I could put to the side and pick up easily enough in the evening without having to disrupt too much of my stuff. This was a chalk pastel drawing of my dog Lucy and one of a goat that I titled ``Meander``. I got an honorable mention for this drawing in the Peace Laird Regional Juried Art Exhibition.
It was in starting to do little, accomplish-able things that I was able to get back into the creative groove. One small thing would lead to another and soon enough I was back to setting up for painting. Now that I have a little more time to paint, although e-learning and setting up a remote classroom was a whole other learning curve, I like to remember that making things and being creative does not have to be the huge, capital "A", Art activities but can be the just gettin' things done activities too.
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