The January clutch. The working space.

{Thirteen instagram squares draw January's days for me. Or do they?}

As I sit down with Louise to draw up answers to Ana Pina’s questions (as part of her interview series on her blog), I am thinking about what I require in a workspace. Very little, it transpires. I may favour natural light, and I like my pets around me as I tinker, but I don’t have many requirements of the space. The same for Louise; natural light is best to draw by, the colours easier to see, the subtleties of tone and shade too, but there is no favorite space or particular pattern. Working from home, I can work anywhere. I usually work on the floor, stretched out in cobra. And as my work is small, so too are the requirements of the space. I need somewhere to place collages in progress that are not yet glued. Preferably somewhere out of the way of Omar, Olive, and Percy. The cats are terrific weavers through a space and don’t knock things too much, but Percy has little time for stepping around paper progress piles, he favours through the middle. To work I don’t need for the house to be in order. If anything, my most productive days are those when the house is in disarray. Perhaps the chaos around serves as a way to focus on the work before me. Perhaps the dishes in the sink and the clothes to be put away serve as blinkers, as a type of tunnel vision. Besides, once one starts those domestic chores (that are never ending), the morning is gone, and so too that brilliant idea that was bobbing about in your mind’s eye. Chores and emails are great ones for absconding with freshly-formed or still-forming ideas. Visible but for only a short time, sometimes ideas are like bright trinkets to be fished out of a choppy sea.

This is what is on my mind today, this first February day. Above is January fragmented. It shows a little of the month and how it felt, though it doesn’t show the indoors where mostly I have been. It’s the bright light highlights. Of chief glaring omission, Omar and Olive. (Instagram can never have its fill of cats and so I’ll endeavor to include those handsome ones in next square roundup here.) I guess that is what happens when, like ideas plucked, one pulls together quick snatches from 31 days and squeezes them into thirteen squares. Things are never really as they seem at first glance. Fine detailed work is done in messy homes and a clutch of photos depicting the great outdoors could lead you to think that this is often where I am.

+ This photo might lead you think I am more handy than I am
+ From the interview series: Sandra Juto, Paula Valentim, Nina van de Goor, Bianca Tschaikner