The List
Courtney Cook With Studies In Her Studio
Byron Bay, Australia
Upcoming Show:
Sorry, I’m Closed Today
Location:
BSA Project Space
On Display:
October 4th
Hours:
Mo-Sa: 10am - 2pm
“I hate everyone,” I texted my best friend Courtney after leaving my house in a huff. Luckily, she was still up (I can never seem to remember our time difference though she has lived in Australia for over a decade now) and thankfully is not one to judge my tantrums.
Courtney, a very talented artist and a single mother to a precious eight-year-old, has been one of my best friends since we met in Vietnam when I was 22 and later lived close to each other in California. A creative through and through, it was Courtney whom I called on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 to ask if she would do all the planning and flowers for my wedding. Charlie and I had decided that morning to get married on Friday.
Had she had a year to plan, Courtney could not have created a more magical day.
In 2008, life and a love took Courtney to Australia. There, her art shifted first to interior design, working as a successful designer after completing design school and later teaching color at Sydney Design School. Then “after several years exploring other avenues to express [her] deep need to create, [she] decided to pick up a paint brush after years of not painting. This is where the journey home to painting began again.”
While Courtney now paints instead of arranging and designing, she still draws upon her wonderful imagination and understanding of color and composition to touch viewers and shift perspectives. Just recently she had the opportunity to broaden a viewer’s context of women in the arts when he asked if she was helping her boyfriend with the large-scale mural in process behind her. No man in sight except for the person who asked the question, she covered in paint after working tirelessly for days with brooms and mops as paint brushes, Courtney pointed out that women could, in fact, create murals all on their own.
Colour Study of Lennox Head, NSW, Australia
Courtney Cook
This week Courtney and I have texted more than usual as she struggled to move around her work schedule to care for daughter, Collette, who had come down with the chicken pox.
As she lovingly tended to Collette, worries of how she could possibly be ready for her solo exhibit in six weeks began to sink in. Questions of what all of this struggle was for came throughout the week. “Maybe,” she wrote, “I should just give up on art.”
This ‘giving up on art/ I’m not cut out for this’ conversation is one that Courtney and I have had a lot. I tend to text her when I am agitated and feel like I have nothing to say, and she writes me when she feels overwhelmed and like maybe this is all a wasted dream.
The interesting thing, though, is that we never actually have these conversations when we are actively creating. Instead, they occur only when we have been out of our studios/offices for too long. So long, in fact, that we forget that it is actually our art that grounds us, and we begin to think we are crazy for wanting to create.
So today... we made a list. A list of signs that it is time to get back to work—and fast! Our lists were so similar to each other’s that we began to think that perhaps we were not alone... So we decided to share our crazy, we-haven’t-been-creating behaviors in case they resonate with others. If not, we enjoyed writing them all the same, for they lost a bit of power once they had been named.
Darkness will fade into the open seA
Courtney Cook
Courtney and Eli’s “It’s Time to Create” List:
1. We hate everyone, especially our favorite people.
2. While a million projects (unrelated to our art) get started, nothing...absolutely nothing gets finished.
3. Our houses are total wrecks, our cars—don’t even ask, and every cabinet in our kitchen is open.
4. Our offices/studios, which are actually incredibly close to our homes, feel forever away and impossible to enter.
5. Everything gets dropped—literally and figuratively—and we can find nothing.
6. We become porcupines: guarded and difficult to love.
7. The world feels extra germy.
8. Everyone seems bound and determined to pull on us and the only option seems to be to run away forever.
9. We think that huge time chunks, which we do not currently have, are necessary to be able to create, so why even bother?
10. We become extra critical of our bodies and find it difficult, if not impossible, to make loving food choices.
11. Words like, “Look! A squirrel!” actually come out of our mouths because we are so distractible.
12. We feel energetically sticky and nothing seems to roll off our backs.
13. Lizzie starts searching for calligraphy courses because obviously everything would be set right in the world by better handwriting.
14. Hours are lost to social media and certain profiles are visited far too many times... usually ones belonging to people who seem to actually have their act together, unlike us.
15. Shame and guilt set in.
16. We forget that the world is full of color and go straight to binary thinking.
17. Book-buying benders occur—perhaps we think these writers’ discipline will rub off on us… Revisit 15.
18. We obsess over whether we should end at 18 or if 19 is a better number.
19. We decide that it is probably time for a career change.
Oh, I wish I had tons of wisdom to share now on how to fix all of this, but I don’t... or maybe I do. Could it be so simple as to just commit to creating a little bit every day? Alas, simple and easy are not the same thing, but perhaps I can try. And, we now have a list to help. :)