Letter 09 / Flexible moves and pool noodles

Ninth letter to my paying subscribers / Notes on movement in, through, and with water.

Dear supporter,

This is a check-in from my studio in early March, written from my couch, where I lie with a cold. The studio is only making a very brief appearance. It is followed by a list of recommendations. If the art isn’t coming from me right now, it will come from others.

I have been back from Finland since February 4th, and I don’t know where February went. Listen, I know it’s a short month, but five days seems a bit extreme?
A seemingly endless lists of tasks took over my life the the point where I haven’t done a single creative thing for my own art practice or my various pending unfinished projects in over a month. Unplugging for all of January will do that to you. I am haunted by tasks. Tasks are the monster sleeping under my bed. Tasks with claws.

drawing paintings without drawing paintings at the museum on a Tuesday afternoon to fight an approaching mid-day anxiety attack

Grateful for a series of illustration jobs, I have mostly been doing work for other people. I also started two gym classes and go to sauna every once a week (a lame Viennese echo of January’s Finnish sauna, but I do enjoy the women’s sauna, a reminder that we all have truly silly naked bodies that mean so much, yet nothing at all in the grand scheme of things). And then there is physiotherapy to fix the wrist pain I’ve been carrying around with me for over half a year. I train the muscles in my fingers with a rubber band. I lean against walls in very deliberate, slow, intense ways. I spend time thinking about the way in which my hips tilt because those, too, are connected to the wrists. I do a little dance. The goal is to be loose and relaxed. “I am always tense,” I tell the therapist in our first session, “but…I don’t think I can get rid of that, given that the world…well…” “The world events are certainly world eventing like crazy.” he interrupts me. We both sigh. He makes a note on his iPad.