My yoga teacher asked me the other day if I teach. Yes... Well, uh, not exactly. That is, I work for the school district, where I do training, but I'm not a classroom teacher. I do teach, though, in my other life as an artist. So we got to talking about the benefits of having multiple work lives. Balance and variety. 

I've struggled my whole adult life with work-work-life balance. Working a day job, "working" at my art (though I prefer to call it play), and having time to enjoy my family, garden, biking, reading, etc., etc. This week alone I've swung from hating my job, to getting excited about it again (thanks Dave!), to working late, being tired and not wanting to do anything, to getting 3 pieces accepted into a show and wanting to drop it all and get beading again. Cycles in cycles in cycles. Strangely, I still have a hard remembering that things change.

So it's good to hear about other people who have multiple work lives, and enjoy it. My yoga teacher teaches yoga (duh), and owns/operates a lovely little cafe. Do you combine work and work? I'd love to hear about it!

After I wrote and published my last post (Doneness, 8/6/12), I realized it was a cleverly disguised complaint about uncertainty. At least I thought it was clever--I admit was pretty enamored with the metaphor. And disguised even from me!

But an artist complaining about uncertainty... sort of like an Inuit complaining about the cold. Huh. Comes with the territory. The whole process of creating is a dance between knowing and not knowing, the seen and the unseen--or as yet unsee-able. But in a weird way it's helpful for me to complain and then catch it, to see what I'm doing. I see more clearly the places where I'm still working, where the fear comes up.

That's really what it's about, I think. Fear. Not knowing, thinking I'm not up to the task, not good enough, not whatever enough. Fill in the blank. Then seeing it, and going back to work. No need to fret, just go back to work. It's only if I don't go back to work that the fear wins out.

Sometimes I wish art were more like cooking. Say you want your steak medium rare, warm pink center. Theoretically (i.e., don't ask me) you know how long to cook the steak, given its weight and thickness. Cook to X (again, don't ask me) temperature, and voila! Steak, medium rare.

Art just isn't that simple (and granted, I'm probably over-simplifying the steak cooking). When is a piece done? When it's you reach the deadline? When you're sick of it? I find I get to a place in a piece where I've done what I know needs to be done -- often most of the beading -- and then I sit there looking at it for a couple days. It needs something, but what? I start trying things, hoping to god I don't do something that irrevocably screws it up. And I keep doing some more things... and some more... and maybe just a little more...

And sometimes, with all this futzing, it turns into something completely different than when I started out. That just doesn't happen in cooking. You don't put a steak in the broiler and cook it a little too long and oops, it turns into a pork chop (of course, it might turn into charcoal).

Actually, I would say that artworks usually turn out to be something different than what I started with. In fact, those are the good ones, the ones that move to a different place than where they began. That's often the point of art, isn't it? To find yourself in a new, unexpected, sometimes gorgeous, often surprising, place?

Which doesn't answer the question of when you know something is done. For me, it usually just feels done. Yep, medium rare. Yum!