blog – Page 2 – Jessica Skowroneck

At my own pace

Once in a while I get overwhelmed with this feeling that there is something wrong with how I do things and the uselessness of it all. Everything should be quicker and more efficient but I don´t seem to see anything happening in my life and work. I luckily always manage to drag myself out of this dark pit again. One more of these episodes of crawling out of the hole of doubt resulted in the realization that as artist or creatives, at many points in our career, we will wonder why we are doing what we are doing and if there is any point in continuing. One reason that we wonder, and there are many, is that our work doesn´t show a direct, measurable result. All too often our work is not even met by a proper increase on our bank-balance, but also the effect it may have on people and their lives is not a directly visible one.

I saw a violinist yesterday on the train station, carrying a sticker on his violin-case saying “linkse hobby´´ (leftist hobby). This is a beloved slogan of the right-wing party of Wilders to justify the cut of the major part of government money going to the support of the arts, claiming that the arts are an expensive hobby for the leftist `elite´. Of course this sticker must have been a joke, if an ironical one. The danger is that we, as artists, actually start to believe in the insulting notion of `linkse hobby´ ourselves. Why don´t we have a proper job and a proper income ourselves, just like everybody else? The answer is very simple: Because everyone else is already doing things that way. A few thousands more workers going to the same old 9-5 job every day wouldn´t make such a difference. A few thousand artists and creative souls less would make a huge difference. It would doom our world into boredom if all artists got a proper job. So, what I am saying is: yes, to try to find our passion, our truth and the thing we can put our heart into is a luxury, a luxury of a time and place where the basics of food and shelter are taken care of. (Even though also the cavemen made art, and I doubt they didn´t have to work hard for their food every day. It might be their society just put art higher on the agenda than the one we live in and therefor supplied the artists with the necessities to do their art-work.)

We don´t need more food, shelter or gadgets here. We need inspiration. We need bewilderment; a cleansing of the eyes, ears and heart to see life with new enthusiasm. This is the reason I am doing what I am doing, however crazy it might sometimes even look to my own eyes.

This is why I will stop telling myself off for not going to work at 9 o´clock every morning and stick to my strange clock of inspiration. This is why I will allow myself to do gardening, because it gives me new insights for my paintings. This is why I allow time for my soul to settle and do nothing, when I need to assimilate whatever new stuff has come into my system. Yes, something is brewing inside at these times. It´s not visible until it comes out. Have patience. Don´t push your artists again into the crazy production treadmill you have created. I won´t take it. I will walk on my own feet, at my own pace.

P.S. Every artist has his or her own unique way of working. What works for one, might not work for the other. I don´t want to say that a 9-5 job never works. Do your own thing and don´t be bothered by the rest of the world.

Winners Royal Prize for Painting 2014 – photos

Article in the Gooi en Eemlander, 2013

Settling in the Village, Blaricum, 1 November 2013

Blaricum, 1 November 2013

Settling in the Village

My world is getting smaller here. It’s as if I only see what I need to see. It is mostly a positive feeling, as my world has been overloaded with information from studies and the city in the past years. Things need to integrate. It feels like I am put back in time here: I function like a child in a way. As a grown-up, one tries to manage more than one space at the time on ones head. To keep everything under control, the whole house should be managed in our head, the whole way to the office or studio is already set out in the mind, before we even go out of the door. It’s probably also part of what a city does with us.

Here I am thrown back on my self and simple things. My emotions are suddenly only my own responsibility, nobody else has caused them, because I am alone. I see one space at a time, even my house is too big to contain at once inside. Even though the house is actually not that big. Every night when I go to bed, I have to reclaim my bedroom as mine. It is as if I finally have the space to expand, and now I actually have to relearn how to do it. When I am inside the house, the garden seems another world. When I come from outside, the whole house seems like a strange space. It takes time to fill it again with me.

But all this is not very fearful. It is, I think, the same feeling as I had as a kid, simply realizing the world is too big for a small head. It’s rather strange that this would become so clear in a village where nothing happens, rather than in the city. But I think the reason is, that in a city the ‘too muchness’ is so overwhelming that we filter the information on a huge scale. In this way we don’t even know that we don’t experience half of the spaces we move through. Here in the village the emergency-mode is finally put off.

There are many horses here, also cats and sheep. Yesterday a cat came running into my house, after some kids asked for tricks or treats at Halloween. The cat stayed for a while, running through my house sniffing, just similar to how I behaved here the first week.

About a week ago, I biked home from Hilversum and saw a small hedgehog on the biking path. I picked it up and put it in the bushes, hopefully so he would stay there rather than run out on the road again. After that I continued my way and cried for many minutes. About what I couldn’t tell you. This hedgehog was just amazing.

It might also have been yesterday. I went to the local bookshop to buy a map of the area. On my way back, a small boy fell from his bike right in front of me, because his shoelace was caught up in his pedals. His mother and elder brother stopped and started reproaching him for being so stupid not to tie his shoelaces. He started crying, not from the falling off the bike, but from this nasty treatment by his family-members. I watched dumb, holding his bike while his mother unwrapped the shoelace. I think she didn’t even see me. But I am sure I am not becoming a ghost. I am sorry for that boy, couldn’t do much for him apart from being there for a few seconds. What a strange mother.

Now I will brush my teeth and reclaim my bedroom again. Reclaim it from the world. Maybe I can find a way to make that a bit more easy. My studio and living room are already much faster to settle in, surely also because they are filled with paintings. Would painting actually be a way to give myself a place here, here in this world? To show myself and other people how that place looks, how it looks like when it really belongs to me. Not as a property, but as a feeling. I feel at home in the world when it looks this way. Now, I don’t know if that is always true, because my paintings are really rather strange. But certainly they do something with the space they are in, and certainly the space becomes my territory. I wonder how this works.

Good night my dear friends.

Mouna