I have had my Climacterica postcard set printed and offered for sale at bigcartel for a couple of weeks. Every sale gives me a thrill and a great sense of affirmation, naturally. It’s much different than feeling satisfaction from nailing a design for a client, because in that case, my work is done to please someone else and solve someone else’s communication problem. Personal work, by contrast, is done strictly to my own desires, esthetic values, and vision.

Now that I’ve made my first sales, I have started thinking like a business woman: keeping track of customers, setting prices, finding the most economical packaging, and of course, thinking about spin-off products.

It’s a whole new world!

A map of the mysterious land of Climacterica (watermarks not on original) © Chris Raymond

Late in the week at Penland, surrounded by cards, sketchbook, and dictionary pages © Chris Raymond
Click on image for more pictures from the week

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the last week of August taking a workshop, “Illustrating the Personal Narrative” at the Penland School. I began the week with trepidation: I’d never really worked in watercolor or pen-and-ink, my drawing skills left much to be desired, in my mind at least, and before even arriving, I had already gotten very bad vibes from the instructor, a brusque New Yorker with no experience teaching the mixed-level classes that define the place.

My week lived down to expectations about the instructor, but exceeded expectations greatly as to the work I produced: a series of postcards from the mythical country of Climacterica, where all the residents are female, minds go absent, lists get lost, and intentions often go far off track.

Like most artists I know, I am REALLY hard on myself and nitpick my work to death. But I have to say, the set of postcards I created please me greatly. They hit my sweetspot of combining concept, humor, color, and writing. And several fellow students are in line to buy these once I get them reproduced.

I’m now researching the best way to reproduce the set and getting tips on selling my work from colleagues; so in a way, this could be one of the more transformative weeks at Penland for me, if it finally nudges me toward selling my work.

The instructor asked us ahead of time to think about a personal event to use as a springboard for our project. At first, I considered my recent move from an apartment I’d lived in for 10 years, with all the associated grief of purging and packing and changing addresses. But after spending nearly two months in the process, I’d like to STOP thinking about it!

Instead, I’m kicking around the idea of making a series of postcards, with fake stamps, from the country of Climacterica. In Climacterica, residents lose their short-term memory abilities, often meander around trying to remember what they got up to do, become easily distracted, and develop annoying but unexplained aches and pains. If you are not sure what I’m talking about, look up the word “climacteric.”

I’ll be posting images of my process and the results in September. No, I will not be posting live from N.C.; one big part of the whole experience is being off the grid (though now we all have to pay a modest fee for wifi access, which frankly, I resent. It’s bad enough to have to be assaulted with people on their cell phones and laptops in everday life. But now have to deal with this in a remote location dedicated to creativity?)

Doggie heaven sculpture view two © Chris Raymond

Well, this week there was bad news and good. The bad news: I couldn’t sleep Monday night. My mind was racing with all the things to worry about regarding my pending move. I took some meds supposedly to help me sleep, but two hours after I went to bed, I woke up and tossed and turned. Finally, 45 minutes later, I gave up hope of getting back to sleep.

Here’s where the good news comes in. I got up and finished Doggie Heaven at long last. I’d been chipping away at it for many weeks, an hour here or there at night. Some (okay, many) nights, not at all. I really felt that I’d bitten off way more than I could chew when I signed up for the Art League School workshop, thinking I would have a piece done over the two days. Hah! That was in March.

But something kept me chugging along. Guilt? The thought that I didn’t want the cost of the workshop and supplies to go to waste? The desire to see a fun concept come to completion? No doubt, a combination of all three.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one’s home environment can greatly affect one’s creative energy. Over the past two-plus years, I have become more and more disaffected by the place where I live, a oldish, sorta run-down garden-style apartment. Friends have noticed how my demeanor has taken a turn for the worse.

Why? Let me count the ways:

• A half-dozen yapping dogs whose owners walk them outside my bedroom window, on the ground floor, and wake me up early in the morning and late at night.
• The way that the front lawn outside my apartment has become the complex’s sports park, in spite of the large open field and playground equipment available at the back of the complex.
• The regular banging and yelling that accompanies the basketball games at the hoop in the parking lot outside my balcony.
• Walls so paper thin you can hear people vacuuming or using a rowing machine—in the adjacent building!

I used to enjoy sitting out on my balcony after work, sipping a cocktail and reading; that pleasure lost its allure when a new tenant started teaching his son to throw a football or hit a baseball literally at the foot of my balcony, and when I got to “enjoy” the parade of dogs doing their duty 10 yards in front of me.

I moved in 10 years ago, and the rent was reasonable for the area. But in the past two years, the annual rent increase was over 5%, much higher than the local norm, and way beyond the quality of the physical plant. Seriously, a $105 increase when I could invite someone from the CDC to discover new life forms in the grout in the bathroom floor tiles? When I had to install two layers of batting inside my bedroom window to try to block out the barking so I could get a good night’s sleep? And to be told that because the dog owners paid pet rent, that they could violate the noise provisions of the lease, but I couldn’t use a bark control device?

In short, I reached the breaking point and found a nice updated condo to move into, in a high-rise with no pets allowed, for only about $80 more a month. In fact, it’s more than $100 less than what my current place will charge for my apartment after they “renovate” it (the maintenance engineer, eyes rolling, told me the renovation entailed oak cabinets in the kitchen and new tile on the bathroom floor, like that will really make a big difference in the quality of life).

So, after dealing with the hassle and big expense of moving, and all the attendant anxiety over the next five weeks, I’m anticipating that once again, I will look forward to going home at night and that my creative juice will be replenished.