How does a studio make you feel?

I look forward so much to being here.

I imagine it the week before, the day before, the night before and early on the morning of. This morning very very early I was in a yoga class with one of my favourite teachers, she had us working really hard, sweating rivers. I loved it but in my head I was also here at this desk: with my music on – hearing the songs that I would like to hear today as I draw at my desk, with that sweet sunlight coming in through the roof window on my left and hitting the wall on my right. I was here even though I was not here; drawing in pencil onto a panel readying it for paint, getting ahead in my thoughts to be here, to make the most if this precious stolen time.

I always strain at the reigns to get here – like ten horses pushing and pulling against the mighty arms of a heavier world; the blood and guts shift work, people to please, the political chaos, eatsleepworkwork/eatworksleep. The more this fast world wraps its belts around me, the more I resist. Quite often I think the belts must snap. It feels like some of us surge the opposite way, away from what we’re meant to do, do we? We need to be held but also to be free. When the belts are off for a day it two, or a week, we jump high towards skies that are blue, light, limitless but then like Icarus, we know we must fall back into our work, our commute, to the reminder of time passing us by and the sense of a tiny desperation that swirls like a spinning top in your tummy.

BUT in my tiny makeshift studio, everything is here, everything is possible.
Here I can do what I want when I like, can paint what I want when I like.
It’s outside of space and time and everything falls away. The processes, the pens, the pencils, the paints, the smells, the colours, the pleasing junk. Here I feel safe from world events, cradled and anchored by a stillness that I can never quite cultivate in the real world. Here is a gentler song. Whereas everywhere else in the world I look to being right here, and when I am here, everything feels okay again (so long as it must never end).

And that is why, I really really like my studio.