May will most likely stay empty.
I was in Monti from April 24 to May 29, 5 weeks, and I hardly picked up a brush.
To be completely honest, I did, I think I did something one evening and one afternoon, but I was so uninspired and distracted that I did not even care to photograph what I did, and I am back in Berlin now so I have no “proof” of it.
May was a tough month, I had decided to open my apartment in Monti to war refugees from the Ukraine but I had underestimated how tough it would be for me. Or perhaps what I had really decided was that although it would have been tough, I had to do it anyway because it was just the right thing to do. They were wonderful, but I was alone and they were three + their dog and it did not take long before I started feeling like a guest in my own home. They did nothing wrong, they are really good people and actually since they had a car (with the front glass badly smashed…I was very nervous each time I got into the car because it looked like it could crash at any too sharp stop or bump) they gave me a ride a couple of times to go food shopping.
But the reality is, I felt trapped and overwhelmed by their presence, by them staying hours – sometimes the daughter would be there until 2 AM – in the kitchen, by the kitchen refrigerator and windows planes being full of their stuff, by the smelll of the food they woudl very often cook, by not being able to go around te apartment in my underwear as I often do in the morning when I prepare breakfast, by not understanding anything they were saying….. and I compensated by working too much physically, each day after work at 6 PM I would pick up my tools and work in the garden until 9 PM and it was too much, physical exhaustion added up to the mental tension, at the end I even felt from a hamoch and torn a muscle in my left back side….Now I am back in Berlin and it will take a few weeks to be normal again.
Painting, for the first time in almost 4 years, was a far away memory. It almost scared me, that I could just drop painting like that. No inspiration at all. It was as if my mental space was taken up by the effort to deal with this “intrusion”. For such a long time everywhere I looked there was something I wanted to paint, and now for more than a month, the silence of the creative mind. It saddens me.
Now I am in Berlin a week and yesterday a did spend one hour with brushes. Tday I will do two or three. Tomorrow 4 maybe. I can feel it coming back.
It is strange how in a beautiful place like Monti my creativity evaporates (or maybe it is redirected towards other projects? Becoming a honey maker, taking care of the park, taking care of the flowers, of the house….) while in the middle of Berlin with fire fighters sirens blowing and buses underneath my window I want to paint much more…
Water, Pigment, Paper, Brushes & Co. 