I sit in the morning stillness at my art studio – a portion sectioned off in my bachelor suite – and write. The studio is cheerful with color, with it’s paints clustered on one side, bright pencils sticking out of collector mugs,
a drawing started last night sitting half finished with bold hearts of reds greens and blues. This morning I drink Maxwell instant sipped from my leaking Starbucks mug. I sit quietly, listening to the the world wake up outside – the cars doors slamming, people talking in the hallway, the seagulls crying good morning – and look at my rapidly growing art studio. As I look at it, I wonder, when did it all become so complicated? Now my sketchbook comes in three different sizes, and stretched canvas and flat canvas boards also take up space. My journals, too, are kept in three different notebooks. As I sip the dark heavy taste of Maxwell instant I ponder this, and I flashback to the previous day…
The world is dancing with sun and the artist friend and I are making our way slowly to Cook street, stopping to admire colorful architecture or newly 
bursting buds. As we walk she mentions a potential job prospect she has – a simple cleaning job – and I am surprised to feel a twinge of envy. To work, to have a steady income, to not have to live off your hopes, dreams, and overdraft. But I hated cleaning I quickly remind myself….didn’t I? For some reason, a melancholy sadness settles in me for my old cleaning job and the easy simplicity of it. We reach Serious Coffee, order large dark roasts, and then are looking over at my display area talking about framing and matting. I flashback to many years ago, to a time long before I ever thought I would be who I am and where I am, and when art was simple; a sketchbook, Crayola pencils, and my bed. Some of my best pieces came from that realm of uncluttered simplicity.
Flash forward back to this morning. For some reason I feel tired inside today, more worn from my sudden success rather than happy. My journal is no longer kept for personal growth, but now each entry is scanned for a potential column entry. It is a fine line as an artist, learning how much to share, and how much to allow to just be yours. It’s a line that every artist must learn to draw in their careers, whether they be writers or visual artists, because all art is a process of showing emotion, expressing your inner being in words or pictures. When art is viewed and critiqued it is not just the creation that undergoes the scrutiny, but also you yourself as it’s creator.
So I sit there in the early morning gray, the pink blossoms of the trees on the boulevard muted against their dreary backdrop 
and think of how complicated things have become, and wonder, what happened to that girl who started all of this? The one sitting in Tim Horton’s, a regular working class girl in cleaning uniform. Now I may have a column published, and have an art display coming up. I listen to the seagulls scream to each other, continue to sip my instant coffee – made as strong as I can without making it bitter, and consider who I was and who I am. I realize that I am now on the threshold of potential success, and now suddenly my step has stopped and pulled back. Sometimes, I think, success might be worse than failure. At least failure leaves you in familiar charted territory, whereas success throws you into the deep end of the ocean with your creations shown to the world to be discussed, critiqued; strangers deciding if your work was worth the effort or not, and for some reason this morning, sitting in the stillness of an art studio that is looking more and more professional, this fact bothers me, and I want to pull back into my former life of simplicity when it was just me, a sketchbook, some pencils, and my bed. Me, a coffee, a diary. But I know I am so close to success, so I fight against my sudden desire to flee back into a creative cocoon, because I won’t know how I feel about success until I reach it, and won’t know if I can swim in the deep end if I don’t first jump in. And it’s like I heard about runners who run marathons, that they know when they are close to the finish line, because it is right then that they want to just stop and give up. So I realize, I am close to the finish line, except in a life of art there is no finish line…..
So I finish my coffee, glance at my latest drawing to see where to put the sand beads and reach towards success….
