I AM WHAT I AM, AND THAT IS RESTLESS

I simply cannot stay still.  There is nothing in me that is willing to remain in one place for any stretch of time, my feet and legs, my mind, my attention span, everything wants to get up and go.  Go where?  It doesn’t matter, anywhere but here.

If I’m sitting if front of the TV, my fingers are constantly strumming on the arm of the chair; at our kitchen counter my feet and legs are bouncing on the footrest. In addition to creating enough noise to drive my dear wife crazy, I have managed to wear the finish off several armrests with my constant strumming.  I’m at my very best when on the cell phone.  In the kitchen I walk around the center island, continuously, without stopping for the entire call.  In the studio I will walk the length of the studio-gallery, back and forth, sometimes actually interfering with the call’s signal.  I don’t know why I do this; it is entirely unconscious.  I’m inclined to believe it is related to some prenatal event in my mother’s life.

I like to read.  There are piles of books all around our home, in my study, the studio, my beside table, and surrounding my favorite chair in the living room.  There has to be, because I rarely read one book or magazine for more than 15 or 20 minutes at any one time.  If I’m reading a mystery/thriller as soon as something critical or dangerous is about to happen I close the book and pick up another one.  Later I will return to the first book and continue reading, only to repeat the cycle again and again. 

It’s the same with my painting, regardless of the medium. I work on a painting one small stage at a time, taking frequent, totally unnecessary breaks, usually to spend another brief period of time on a book or two that I’m reading.  After painting one element or portion of the work I quickly step away, whether it took 3 minutes or 30 minutes. For this reason, I like to have more than one piece of work in progress at the same time, frequently in different mediums.  Then when I move from one to another I can feel productive and ambitious and not neurotic and spastic.  I very rarely complete a painting from start to finish in one sitting.  Small watercolors or drawings are the exception. My helter-skelter habits make for a rather schizophrenic studio, with workstations continually evolving and moving; to counter this I’ve turned to rolling carts.  I now have four of them, each holding a different medium, and easily moves about to accommodate my own moving about.

I would love to finish this piece now but I gotta go…really.