sometime in my late thirties, i inherited, from a friend who was downsizing so she could travel, a beautiful armoire that was so enormous ricky and i couldn’t get it through the front door of the elegant old apartment we moved in to after we sold our house. for years it sat in our garage, playing witness to us jumping up and down cursing after ramming our toes or shins in to it, and sucking our stomachs in as we crab-walked between it and the wall of ricky’s studio. it was a behemoth piece of furniture which for rick was in the way of necessities (mountain bike and drums) but for me held the promise of a future space with wider doors and bigger rooms where beautiful behemoth pieces of furniture could happen. it was all a bit strange because it is almost identical to an armoire i drew before ever seeing it for a children’s book i was working on. stranger still because years after receiving it and ultimately finding a house with wide and lovely doors that it could move through, i learned that the person commissioned to design and build it was a very handsome boy i grew up with, attended the same high school as, and perhaps had a wee bit of a crush on.

the power space holds has grown more impactful as i have gotten older. i feel it keenly as i move through my daily life, and now that i am painting again, there are additional layers of space sitting upon my existing preoccupations with space that i also have to attend to. mostly because when a painting is started, regardless really of subject matter or storyline or content, a new space is being created. however it resonates, a little universe that wasn’t there before you made it is now alive in the world, to be beguiled by, disregarded, or anything in between.

i experienced this a short time ago when i was invited to participate in a small group show at a gallery where i live. the piece that showed had been in my studio for months in various incarnations of what it would become, and as happens to me when working on a painting, we had become very good friends. entering the gallery for the art opening and observing it amongst other works, occupying its own lovely space as a thing in the world, took me by surprise. within the context of its new, albeit temporary home, the painting became, right before my eyes, something different and separate from what it had been on my table. It was all grown up, and didn’t need me anymore. if paintings were allowed to have drivers licenses, it probably would have driven itself away from me (in this case to its lovely new owner’s home) without even a backwards glance.

in august of this year i enrolled for a week of online planning sessions with a brilliant art mentor in colorado, then began my first three month program with her in september amongst a wonderful group of other artists from a few far corners of the world. the lot of us have been practicing art for most of our lives, and are at various stages of our careers. many are far more established than i am, having been at it for considerably longer. for me, having just pivoted away from 15 years of designing graphics to fine art, every ounce of everything was brand new and exciting and terrifying. the week long planning sessions were intense; i imagined this was because so much had to be packed in to just five days. it turns out a lot can be packed in to three months as well.

i stayed the course until my daughter had jaw surgery in november, after which the space and momentum of our life got physically very small as we honed in on care giving, cooking small meals that don’t require chewing, and tending to our collective emotional health. it is hard for an eighteen year old to be with at least one of her parents 24 hours a day, and her temporary loss of autonomy meant ours was gone as well. truthfully it has been secretly delicious having my daughter captive and close by these past six weeks, but the planning and energy required has pushed to the back burner much of what takes place during our normal lives. the narrow scope of our new routine probably would have been much harder to manage had we not all been prepared by eighteen months of studying and working from home during the pandemic.

weeks passed and the work piled up. with maya healing at home, there wasn’t enough time in a day to get to all of it, and in the evenings when i usually find a few quiet hours to be in the studio, i was depleted. my daughter was doing beautifully in her recovery, something that should have been enough to bring a restful mind. instead, i felt overwhelmed. i had created a binder for the bounty of tasks and materials coming weekly for my mentorship, and the paperwork took on a life of its own, appearing to actually proliferate while i slept. so many emails and assignments were going unanswered, and in an attempt early one morning to organize and get a handle on everything online, i knocked an entire cup of coffee on to my laptop keyboard just as maya was jumping on zoom for her first class of the day. 

i sprinted for the kitchen and a stack of towels. by the time i got back to my computer it was making a sad little moaning sound, and the power light actually dimmed slowly and blinked a few times before going out entirely. i realized in that moment it was the motherboard’s last breath; i had murdered my laptop. the next hour was an almost out of body experience as i blow dried the battery after getting instructions from my computer-fixer-wizard-friend, and tried not to cry. i opened up the back of the computer and ceremoniously laid towels over everything inside that i could get to; not so much as a eulogy, but to soak up the little puddles of liquid that were everywhere.

with my laptop unavailable and after a few minutes of feeling utterly lost, i realized there was nothing to do but make another coffee, and wait for my computer wizard who wouldn’t come until end of day. i had to rethink and adjust to a day that would not involve anything online. no design, no photo editing, no homework, no banking. an incredible sense of calm washed over me. i had been dismissed from the planned obligations of the day, and it opened before me like a wondrous place i hadn’t visited in a long while. 

my glee was unexpected. the possibility that my hard drive might be damaged, that i could lose hundreds of files of old work, old correspondence, letters from a life time ago, passwords no longer used, saved recipes never cooked, was exhilarating. i’ve got old school 4 x 5 transparencies of most of my artwork, and maya’s entire childhood in photographs saved on an external hard drive. what, beyond that, is really important? if the contents of my hard drive were irretrievable, damaged, obliterated, the sun would shine just as brightly and life would continue on, mine included. the weight of years of work lifted, the unfolding space of the day shifted, and i felt impossibly light and free. i had to ask myself, when did i get so tethered to my life online and the devices that keep me there?

that day changed things. it took one seemingly disastrous moment to be reminded that the amount of time and mental energy required and taken up by obligations and dalliances online is damaging and absurd. i have been compelled and affected by physical space most of my life: it has driven my connection to art and design, inspired me to travel, pushed me to write and explore the landscapes built of words. somewhere along the line, i had allowed the world of my 22 inch monitor to take on the import of larger, freer, more compelling views.

anyone who’s done a bit of art study will know that if negative space goes wrong, it will demand more attention than what created it. once negative space is seen, it can be hard to unsee. but if you want an image to maintain the value you assigned it, its resulting negative space has to remain neutral or serve as a contrast to your central focus. i think of it as the quiet parts of an artwork, a place for the eyes to rest, or a vehicle to make the louder components sing. i also really like it as a metaphor – those things that need to be sent to the background, that are there to support and make shine what is primary. so it makes sense that i am choosing to see my time online as the negative space in my life now. it must exist to embellish the things that are my central to my work and life, and stay in the background where it will enhance my endeavors, not shape them. negative space is not in itself something bad; just the necessary counterpart to all the positives.

i no longer go to bed with my phone close enough to pick up, and i start my day at the pretty marble table sketching and having coffee with my girl while the {new} laptop is safely tucked away. computer and mobile now have a bedtime, unless i am on a deadline or enchanting long distance call, all tabs are closed and the laptop at least is shut down. i don’t want it getting any big ideas, or a misguided sense that it gets to occupy the foreground again, any time soon.