Funny Open Hour, Signs! 01/24/2010
Sign on my touring caravan door. "Open Hours: Open most days about 9 or 10. Occasionally as early as 7, and sometimes as late as 12 or 1. We close about 5:30 or 6. Occasionally about 4 or 5, and sometimes as late as midnight, or later. On somedays we're not here at all, but lately we've been here a lot, unless we're not here." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sign on my Summer Studio Retreat Door. ‘Closed’, I will meet friends in face book, the park or the shopping mall for a coffee. I am very busy continuing to work toward our 2010 tour of Eastern Australia. I have organized cardboard displays, which I love, for the small handmade art cards and bookmarks we will have for sale direct from the artist, available only from our caravan, while on tour, on request. We will not be showing any of these items to people from our summer studio retreat as this is my creative time, not our interacting with people time. I know other creative vocation artists; will understand the need for a creative retreat, a time for an artist and writer to isolate themselves away with their work. My sister who is a writer and artist living in California lives in a log cabin in wilderness adjacent to a National Park, up the North Coast, past San Francisco. She mixes with people only at exhibitions and the theatre, this is how artist writers need to live, and even with this isolation, she tells me she is two years behind in her work. Somehow, I too, need to create this barrier of isolation during my time here in Victoria. I need this time to create, while I have access to larger studio space where I can spread out my work. I do not want to offend or reject offers of friendship, but my summer home and studio, is private. The only address, I give out is that of one of my daughters, I cannot broadcast the address of a place that I advertise as being vacant for six months a year, while we tour. I have no address on my business card. Our address is listed officially as ‘Highways of Australia, and in summer that’s opposite an oat field, near a lake, in the Goulburn Valley on private property, doesn’t even have a street that is listed on the map of the town and we are not ‘in’, for visitors, we are ‘in creative retreat’. It is not quite the ideal for the artist writer, log cabin, retreat, in the wilderness, my sister has, but it is ours and we love it and the privacy we seek for it. I hope my friends will understand my need for creative retreat time and place. |



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