Time Marches On

The weather was nice enough yesterday to work outside at the studio, so I taught my friend something about encaustic, a quick course A to Z.  It was pleasant sitting outside on the loading dock working slowly on small cradles (the boxes that support the encaustic), putting down images, waxing, scraping, transferring images, repeat.  She was better at it all than I am immediately.  I am a sloppy worker without much digital dexterity and less patience.  I am good at concepts, and I know what I want to do sometimes, but I need help.  It is good to have help.

Wax on, wax off.

Later, the encaustic artist from the studio behind mine came over.  It was pleasant, though I hate being the least accomplished craftsman in the group.  But I get better and learn something about patience around them.  Alone, I try to shortcut everything.  There are no good shortcuts.  The long way around is usually best.  A day or two it takes for anything, not an hour or two.  And so their works are fabulously polished and finished when they are done.  Mine looks like they fell out of the car at eighty miles per hour.  "Oh," I'll say, "I'll have to fix that."  But I don't.

And when it is all finished for the day and the sun is setting and everyone is having a beer and chatting and laughing. . . things are good.

I exclude myself from little communities too much.  And it is too bad, because I do enjoy them sometimes.  It is just that I don't want to be intimately tied to them.  "Among the throng, but not of the throng," I think.  Inside and outside at once.  That was the wonderful attraction of the Alan Rudolph movie, "The Moderns," a perfect amalgam of modernist themes and symbols.

But I wander.  I will let myself fall, possibly, into a community or two.  If they'll have me.  And, I guess, if I can stand it very long.