{"id":5316,"date":"2017-09-20T12:04:25","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T19:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeinfullcolor.com\/?p=5316"},"modified":"2017-09-20T16:39:17","modified_gmt":"2017-09-20T23:39:17","slug":"september-20-2017-room-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeinfullcolor.com\/dev\/life-stories\/september-20-2017-room-ones\/","title":{"rendered":"September 20, 2017 – A room of one’s own"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pastels on display in Sue’s studio.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last week Sue, an artist in our community, texted to say she wouldn\u2019t be coming to paint with us on Thursday.\u00a0 She had a project to finish.\u00a0 She was reclaiming her childhood bedroom as her studio.\u00a0 Many years ago she and her husband moved into the house in Greenbrae she grew up in, and raised their three kids there.\u00a0 The room that she shared with her sister, and then was hers alone when her sister went off to college, was her husband Paul\u2019s home office.\u00a0 A lightning bolt recently struck her:\u00a0 she needed her room back!<\/em>\u00a0 Their kids are launched into their lives \u2013 either in or finished with college – and there are now rooms sitting empty.\u00a0 And – this<\/em> room has the best light and an amazing view giving it an inspiring sense of spaciousness \u2013 it needed a higher purpose.\u00a0 After all, Paul mostly looks into a computer screen when he\u2019s in that room.\u00a0 No more painting at the kitchen counters \u2013 Sue was going to have a room of her own.<\/p>\n

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Sue’s reclaimed space to paint in. Annie-dog seems happy to be there at Sue’s feet.<\/p><\/div>\n

She collected her things that were stored in spots all over the house:\u00a0 her art supplies, personal books and teaching materials.\u00a0 She re-arranged the closet to store it all.\u00a0 She painted the room previously a rich chocolate brown a sunny pale yellow.\u00a0 Some new furniture from Ikea to store things and work on and she was set.\u00a0 I had the privilege of being her first visitor \u2013 it was a thrill to share in her excitement.\u00a0 Sue is often a fountain of enthusiasm, but this seemed different \u2013 yes there was all the material work she\u2019d done, but there was something else too.\u00a0 She was making a statement to her family, to herself and to the world that her creative self must have its place, its own physical space.<\/p>\n

Sue’s reclaimed space to paint in. Annie-dog seems happy to be there too.I had a moment like that.\u00a0 Joe and I were remodeling the house.\u00a0 We started with three bedrooms \u2013 we each had a sleeping room (we get much better sleep in our own beds) and he had a den.\u00a0 The remodel was replacing one of the bedrooms with a large master suite on a new second story.\u00a0 That upstairs room would primarily be his room and there would be – for the first time – a TV in the bedroom.\u00a0 Before the remodel I was painting in a corner of the garage that I\u2019d set up for myself as a studio.\u00a0 But the new garage would have no windows and no nook for me to nestle into.<\/p>\n

We had a talk in the middle of construction about how the rooms would be used in the new floorplan. The assumption was that we\u2019d use the rooms as we did before to which I heard myself say, \u201cso there will be three<\/em> places (bedroom, den, living room) to watch TV and I still<\/em> don\u2019t have a place in the house to paint?\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m writing this post in that room right now \u2013 it\u2019s been my work\/paint\/create space for the past 11 years.\u00a0 Though I know that my sweetheart really misses having a den, I can\u2019t imagine being without a space that my creativity calls home – a place that is my<\/em> space \u2013 no one else to negotiate with about any part of it.<\/p>\n

I saw my Sister Mary for spiritual direction last week \u2013 the first time since my big hike, so she wanted to hear all about it.\u00a0 At the end of my tale, she said that I now have a \u201cMount Whitney room\u201d inside me.\u00a0 She talked of how Carl Jung said that complex people have many rooms inside them and that if we say vital and alive, we create new rooms inside us throughout life.\u00a0 This was in the back of my mind as I visited Sue on Friday, the idea that we have an artist room \u2013 a watercolorist room, inside<\/em> us.\u00a0 I can feel it.\u00a0 This room holds our knowledge and skills of the craft of watercolor, our sense of accomplishment from the paintings we\u2019ve done and the relationships with the people with whom we share all of this.\u00a0 We use the word \u201cside\u201d to describe aspects of a person \u2013 one could have a tomboy side, or a glamor side, but \u201croom\u201d is more alive to me.\u00a0 Rooms are three dimensional and they have boundaries that contain distinct parts of us.<\/p>\n

As I left Sue\u2019s house I was making the connection between her inner and outer room and wondering about the relationship there must<\/em> be between the two.\u00a0 If we have no inner room the outer room is superfluous.\u00a0 Who inside us would tell us to go into the room and make stuff?\u00a0 But once the inner room is established to a degree, it seems the outer room becomes an imperative.\u00a0 The occupant of the inner room insists upon it!<\/p>\n

Without realizing it until now, the relationship between a person \u2013 an artist \u2013 and their creative space is something that I\u2019ve been curious about for a while.\u00a0 There is something magical about visiting a studio \u2013 this is where the magic happens<\/em>!\u00a0 One I visited was gorgeous, a huge room, freshly remodeled, built-in storage all over and an enormous work table – supplied to the hilt with things to create with.\u00a0 Its occupant called it her \u201ccraft room.\u201d\u00a0 I told her that \u201cthis wasn\u2019t her craft room<\/em> \u2013 it was her studio<\/em>!\u201d People dream to have studios like those of some of the artists in our community:\u00a0 one studio in an attic space with a window looking out on the neighbor\u2019s roof tops \u2013 you have to climb up a ladder to it – the quintessential artist hideaway.\u00a0 Another is also built in an attic space, but this one is bigger with little windows in dormers and a chaise longue for when the artist needs a little rest.<\/p>\n

And when I was working at Light Rain I was invited into the studio of one of our clients.\u00a0 She had a big, beautiful high-ceilinged store that sold art-oriented things for the home.\u00a0 Next door was the biggest single-artist studio I\u2019ve ever seen \u2013 as big as the whole store!\u00a0 It was filled with cases of books, bones, shells, sponges, antique objects, paints and lots of in-progress work.\u00a0 Oh, my.\u00a0 What a space! I wonder about the enormity of this artist\u2019s imagination \u2013 of her inner room – that it requires this<\/em> much space to create from.\u00a0 I honestly wouldn\u2019t have any idea what to do with all that space for just my own creating.<\/p>\n

I see the connection between these women, these artists and their spaces and see how one reflects and creates the other.\u00a0 Virginia Woolfe gave us the phrase \u201cA room of one\u2019s own\u201d from her essay about Judith Shakespeare, Will\u2019s fictional sister.\u00a0 It\u2019s largely a feminist piece \u2013 women in her time did not enjoy the relative freedom and resources many of us have now.\u00a0 Though we have more resources, education and freedom empowering us to create, and many of us have inner and outer rooms-of-our-own, there is the need to support women\u2019s creative lives.\u00a0 I discovered online an organization called \u201cA Room of Her Own Foundation\u201d whose purpose is just that.\u00a0 AROHO provides women writers and artists a way to gather and connect to each other.\u00a0 I found this line on their website:\u00a0 Whenever and however we are in each other\u2019s presence we are AROHO. (A Room of Her Own)<\/p>\n

This past week marked six years that I\u2019ve been at the center of such gatherings of women (and a few men) artists.\u00a0 Thanks to my amazing Mama\u2019s generosity, 537 Magnolia Avenue in Larkspur, California has become our collective room-of-our-own.\u00a0 The building shelters us and our shared purpose as creators contains us as we make art, thereby forming and reinforcing each of our inner rooms.\u00a0 The energy of the collective carries us until such time as our inner room grows so large that we need our own room-of-our-own, like Sue just has.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a big step in a person\u2019s life:\u00a0 to claim resources for our self on behalf of our creativity.\u00a0 It\u2019s one form of brave.\u00a0 It had to take courage for Sue to assert to her husband that she wanted his space, as it did for me, knowing it meant my hubby would no longer have his man-cave.\u00a0 There\u2019s always a cost.\u00a0 This is what Virginia Woolfe wanted for herself and for us – to declare that there is something within us that is worthy of these resources, the time and space to create.\u00a0 By doing so, we participate in the unfolding of ourselves as people and in the expansion of our society as a whole.<\/p>\n

To your brave – and with my love,<\/p>\n

Cara<\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week Sue, an artist in our community, texted to say she wouldn\u2019t be coming to paint with us on Thursday.\u00a0 She had a project to finish.\u00a0 She was reclaiming her childhood bedroom as her studio.\u00a0 Many years ago she and her husband moved into the house in Greenbrae she grew up in, and raised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSeptember 20, 2017 - 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