Artist Envy

I’ve spent the last two weeks or so redecorating our extra bedroom. It was an overwhelming Noah’s Ark motif. Now it’s a small art gallery. It’s a lot better now. There is a lot of creativity involved in interior decorating, and I’m always interested in exploring new art forms.

The shopping is circular, inefficient, and frustrating, although the results have been very satisfying. I’ve outfitted the room completely and stayed inside a modest budget. I really love all the things that have found their way to this room. My red leather chair, my ergonomic laptop desk, the indigo curtains, the sculpted metal curtain holdback, the painted ceramic switch plate, even the luggage rack I purchased for guests has a certain elegance to it.

The work itself can be pretty grueling. I tried to get it all accomplished during the week I had off my nanny job, so I worked on it from morning to evening five days in a row. The fumes, repetitive stress, and just the weirdness of the postures and muscles I was using all made me sore, swollen, and exhausted. After consulting with a nurse friend of mine, I also determined that I might be allergic to the brand of wall paint I was using. The results are fantastic, though. Mint green paint and cartoon animals have been replaced with a gorgeous white called dove wing, and all the fantastic visual art that’s been waiting for a home in our house. And this is officially the only room in the house where the trim and baseboards are not covered in chipped, off-white paint. No, in here they are a luscious dark brown.

Through this whole experience, I’ve found that I can really envy visual artists. It is such a wholly satisfying experience to watch physical things change because of my work. All the questions of whether it’s working or not can be answered by an inner intuition that lies in my eye. It’s beautiful, it has real color, and you can see that it’s different when you’re done. In contrast to how I interact with a novel, there is something powerful about being able to look at a whole piece, just look at it. Maybe I’m just frustrated with the particular piece I’m working on (or not working on, as is too often the case), but it’s hard for me to return to my black words plodding down the electric white screen.