obsessions

I have spent a lot of time this year building on my art practice to include daily sketchbook hours, and I like to believe filling a journal with drawings, musings or rants is all for the good of my art.  In one of the many creativity treatises I have been reading, I was encouraged to obsess about something I was making, and that that kind of obsession is good and will keep drawing you back to the studio.  All too often I obsess and worry about things that have no place in the studio:  my kids, vacuuming, laundry, the roof that might leak( it was fixed three years ago), the basement that might flood( it gets a little damp after a rain), my kids' school projects and sport schedules, my husband's meetings and sports schedules, the mess in the mud room, when will I have time to see my family, what to plant this spring, exercising enough, sleeping enough, am I out of coffee or chocolate and again, always, my kids.

My Dad once told me whatever it is you do in life, be the best at it. Unfortunately, sometimes I think I am just the best worrier in America...

But,  back to the work at hand. I am trying to embrace this new obsession of nests and leave some of my other 'bad' obsessions at the studio door.  Here's what I am up to; you may have seen some of these before- some journal pages, some painting, some drawing.  Yesterday in the studio I had the most profound thought (that may be a little dramatic, but it felt that way to me).  I was getting sore in the back and crampy in the wrist while working on one of the three big nest drawings I have in progress, and beginning to feel impatient with the process, when it occurred to me: It probably takes me just as long to draw a nest as it does for a bird to build one....and I don't have to use a beak to do it.