ART, AWAKENING & LOSS

Daisy Eneix, PERSEPHONE IN HADES, 2012 graphite drawing, 22x30

(click on image to enlarge)

Daisy Eneix, SONGBIRD, 2012 graphite drawing, 22x30

(click on image to enlarge)

Daisy Eneix, FELINE, 2012, graphite drawing, 22x30
(click on image to enlarge)

It has been five months since I sent a package to myself from Can Serrat, Spain, which contained preparatory drawings created over a period of six months, and the final drawings I created at a residency while there, a time when my hand was fully coordinated with my eye and the muse, and I had the luxury of drawing six hours a day and took full advantage of it.

I experienced pure joy in the making of these drawings. That I could address this multilayered material, be both isolated and surrounded and influenced by other artists who were also wresting with their muses, and not feel as if I wanted for anything except to be doing what I was doing was a kind of celestial experience. I was channeling a precise and clear energy, purposeful, sometimes huge, but remarkable in its focus and total absence of fear. In martial arts, the peak experience for me is similar. There was a deep awareness and contentment, a stillness inside of motion. It was a kind of awakening. I was realizing a vision, I was open to being guided, and I was in contact with pure creation.

The package of these drawings never arrived. I am lucky that I have any record at all, but I do really wish I had the originals, as well as all of the other sketches and beginnings of new works that were with them. Maybe their loss is the catalyst intended to force me to turn a corner, or release the subject matter altogether, or it's just part of the larger letting go of many things this year. Maybe they will show up one day. It's hard to say. I don't know entirely what to make of it. But I'm trying to listen.

I am grateful that my dear friend and traveling companion Susan Schen took photographs of the drawings with a real camera. They were taken in a combination of sunlight and indoor light, as they were never intended as a final record. Unfortunately, large, gray pencil drawings on gray paper --particularly when so detailed and full of purposely faint lines alongside dark, coarse ones -- don't photograph well without professional lighting, if at all. But since I do have these 'ghosts' of them, I wanted to share them (above).

It is so much harder, while operating in the world of practicality, human relationships and the social and professional practices that are just as essential to me as art, to remember how important this relationship is, the one waiting there, with the Muse. I can only access it when I am truly solitary, and only when I give it my full, undivided attention. Since I am not the kind of person that naturally leans toward solitude, this is always a challenge. But the memory of this and the posting of these drawings may help me to keep striving towards it amongst the other, competing strivings.

I am so grateful to Can Serrat for creating the kind of holding space that they do for the artists who come. It is not only the delight and aesthetic wonder of the place but also its hosts, who imbue it with the kind of spaciousness and quiet, love, tending and merriment, eclecticness, chaos and edge, that allows artists to feel both at home in solitude and in the company of their peers. And also dinners to die for. This seems to be especially helpful for artists.

Overall, I'm just grateful that I got to have this experience, and how vivid it remains in me.

More about Can Serrat:
http://www.canserrat.org/

Additional details of the artwork above are posted on the Can Serrat blog at: 

http://www.canserratart.com/2012/07/meet-artist-daisy-eneix.html