The Artist’s Date Awaits

It was the last day of July. After a scorching month, the heat and humidity vanished. It was one of those days that the poet, Billy Collins, describes as “a day of all lawn and sky…a day that gives you no choice, but to sit outside in a rough wooden chair,” or, in my case, get out of the house and take myself on an artist’s date. Coined by writer Julia Cameron, an artist’s date is a solo expedition to nurture and spark creativity. The date is with you, the artist, but I like to think of it as a date with other artists too.

Summer is ending, and the “heads of the roses begin to droop” as Collins said. Watercolor sunsets paint the sky, a harbinger of fall. What had I accomplished this summer? What writing of worth?

If each day is the same as the last, that’s no way to live unless you find the blessing in each day.

I drove the verdant Brandywine Valley to a museum tucked behind tall purple phlox and creamy Queen Anne’s Lace along a river of dreams that inspired the great Andrew Wyeth. The museum featured an exhibit by an Italian artist I had never heard of. Nature inspired much of Joseph Stella’s work, as well as a longing for a fleeting Italy he once knew, and his birthplace by the bay. A riot of flowers and Madonna paintings, of swans and squashes, of lotuses and gardenia, of Mount Vesuvius and the Isle of Capri graced the gallery.

This bounty of paintings, a symbol of a prolific artist who cultivated his artistry until he died got me thinking. When was the last time I wrote? A week ago? Two weeks ago? Although my ideas, as Ray Bradbury said, “wake me like an alarm clock,” they don’t always reach paper. I put the dark thoughts aside, the buzz of talk radio portending demise, and say, “Who wants to read that?” So I lounge on the sofa and pick up a novel. Have you read the work of Dennis Lehane? I’m reading his latest Small Mercies. His fiction is a getaway and entertaining instruction about the human condition, and its psyche. The man is a marvel of a writer.

Today, I sit at my big black desk. The hum of the highway down the hill is dulled by the birds outside my open window (no air conditioning today). The talk radio is off. I’m writing thanks to Stella, to Lehane, and to Wyeth, and Cameron. An artist awaits. I’m ready for my next date here along the writer’s way. How about you?