Art Blog - Calligraphy: A Scribe's Notes

Over this past Labor Day weekend Alex and I painted the living room and dining room, yellow. I had been thinking about changing the color, agonizing really, for months. My first thought was yellow and my final thought was yellow. Which yellow? Alex didn't really care as long as I made a decision already. Two paint stores and 20 color swatches later I ended up picking the first yellow I was drawn to. Why do we do that? I suppose we have to satisfy ourselves that we explored all the options, is it because we are afraid to make a mistake, or is it because like Goldilocks it has to be "just right"?

I digress, the object of my story is that antique case clock over there in the corner. It belonged to my Aunt Marie and when staying with her, the clock was a sort of a constant companion, the ticking so soothing, the chimes so reassuring. Unless of course you were sleeping next to it, then it jolted you awake on the hour, like Big Ben. When Aunt Marie passed, the clock was carefully disassembled and brought to my house, where it immediately ceased to run. We leveled it, talked to it, fiddled with it, with no success. I supposed that it just missed Marie. For five years that clock has stood silent.

In order to paint behind the clock we had to carefully slide it over in front of the window. Where it immediately began to run. After we exchanged matching expressions of mouth gaping amazement, we concluded that either Aunt Marie was messing with us, or that the clock just didn't like it over in the corner, it liked it here in front of the window. We let it go, to keep perfect time and wake us on the hour through the night. I was ecstatic, but it couldn't stay in front of the window, for a variety of reasons, so we carefully slid it back the 2.5 feet to the corner, where it immediately stopped. Put it in front of the window, tick tock, back to the corner, silent.

We knew it was a matter of balance so we got out the levels and the lasers and the shims and tried 20 different combinations, non of which worked as usual. We noted that when the clock was in front of the window it wasn't "level" at all. It pitched forward and slightly to it's left. So we went about replicating the same skew, only over by the wall. A couple of terse words and a few hours later, it ticked, then tocked and has been running perfectly since.

It made me think about balance and how we all strive for the perfect combination of art and life and time with varying success. When I am at a conference or at Snow Farm for a week, immersed in art, surrounded by artists, I am "in front of the window". The ideal setting, a perfect environment, but I can't stay there. I have to go back to "the corner" where life and gravity and physics pull me out of whack and I get stuck. The solution is to replicate as best I can, the environment that works "by the window" while I am aesthetically pleasing in the corner. It takes trial and error, time, frustration and many false starts but it works, restoring rhythm even if I do have to be propped up on a couple of shims and a beer mat.

How do you find balance?

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