Newsletter, blog - Paula Zima.com-

I'm calling this the big gap, because
this was a time of what felt like nothing happening. In retrospect, it was more a fallow time, a resting time- as far as making artwork goes. Ever felt like that in one way or another?

After finding a very nice place to live, there were the logistics of going back to California to get our belongings and setting up our new place in Santa Fe.

I found it very time consuming, but great fun to search around a town I'd
known but had changed so much, to find all the ends and odds that a person needs to make a comfortable home.

Somehow I'd envisioned that we'd just open the boxes, put the art up on the walls and around the house, and there we'd be, and we could both get back to work. But I found it that I still didn't feel that creative energy I'd been expecting.

I heard a woman talk about artists and what they need to be productive. One thing she mentioned that I related to was that when a person moves to a new location, it can sometimes take about 19 months to feel really settled, and to be ready to get going again.

Don't get me wrong, I was working, on illustration projects for See's Candies, and a sweet commission for some old friends back in California, a bronze Yellow Billed Magpie, and doing some sculpure musings in clay. But I'd thought that I would immediately start right in painting wildly, and soon be ready to search for a local gallery to handle my work, that definitely was not happening.

Basically I was just enjoying being here, going to gallery walks on Friday nights, and loving the smell of the piñon wood in the fireplace, and exploring the open land outside our gate with the horses.

Shortly after our decision to stay here
the spring monsoon rains that usually come a month later, started. This was 100 yrs. rain people said, after a 10 year drought.

Twelve years earlier, I'd been living south of Santa Fe at the Allan Houser compound when the drought was already in progress about 2 years, but the monsoon rains were still normal.

For the 10 years after that, things kind of dried up. With this big rain, flowers came up that hadnt' been seen in a long time, and the desert was green. I just figured that the Southwest was happy to see us and had decided to celebrate.

The rain was followed by a heavy snowfall right after Christmas, that stayed on the ground for more than a month. All quite a change from our old home on the central coast of California!

All in all after deciding that I was in a state of fallowness, rather than an artists slump, I felt better, knowing that change would come, as it always has, and it would be good when it finally did.

See you in a while!- Paula

maquette chair

One of my clay sculpture musings.

Sept

For Peace Day on 21 September...
I will check my thoughts for peacefulness. What will you do? Visit www.peaceoneday.org