Under the Roof

I admit to mixed motives in posting this photo of the chaos which needs sorting in my studio space.
(Do I need to tell you I have a tendency to over-think)!
The first motive is probably to shame myself into actually doing something about it.
There's gratitude too as my lovely husband Bill generously made this space under the roof for me to play in. It has turned into a place where I can retreat at times, for a spot of quiet, but mostly it is a place I turn to in desperation to get some of the things in my head "out there", in paint, or whatever comes to hand. I'm apt to just make marks mostly and watch to see where they want to lead me, but it can work the other way too when something just sings out to be set down somehow.
These sessions of losing myself in the process of colour, and line, and just the joy and frustration of the material at hand, leave the place in varying conditions of mess. Though I am always strict with myself about cleaning brushes, too often one mess just slithers into the next with the result you see above. This is the stage when really it is impossible to work any longer. Hence the sketch books and stuff around downstairs, and the use of watercolour which is so much more portable and easy to sit at the table with than anything else.
So I'm scatological and un-disciplined. Along with, as I write I recognise that there is still the need to own the fact that being creative is a primary drive for me when most of my up-bringing told me that this was a self-indulgence, and of no possible use to anybody.
How sad that we can be conditioned to feel that what is most natural and deeply necessary to our very being is somehow wrong.
The good news is that it is never too late to own some part of ourselves that we are in danger of letting die, and as Irenaeus so famously said "The glory of God is a human being fully alive".