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"why on-line shops" painting

WORK EFFORT?

This effort to open my entire portfolio and edit the images for on-line store is an extremely hard task for me to grapple with in my mind. I am an artist with a personality disorder and I maintain control over it with self imposed isolation, fish oil and folate, strict sleeping habits and routine. I have trouble with depression and mania. I built THE EDITH COLLECTION portfolio by obsessively working day in and day out and it worked. I could ride the storms out. I lived for the presentation at the SURTEX show in New York each year. I presented my portfolio there every year for 16 years. When you went there your ideas, your work, designs, contacts - they were all confidential. No artist was allowed in the booth of another without express permission. No cameras. All my work was kept from the public for 16 years. The show grew and grew and grew. It was alive with artistic expression and creativity. Alive with excitement. Alive with the anticipation of licensing your creations to a manufacturer. The artists there came from all over the world not just the US but from all over the world. Every year new artists came and every year artists vanished from the scene. I loved it. It was like blood in my veins.

Now, I am trying to take all the hundreds of images and open them out into print on demand shops. The shops are like massive groups of social bees incestuously visiting and touching the images and using them to reach their own opportunities. It is so opposite. It is so unreal and yet I feel compelled to take this portfolio which made me a fine living and open it like a thief trying to sell the images on the street corner. My psyche hurts inside as I do this. WHY? ...and my images, well, they are not sacred or they would be in some church. They’re not. They are in a storage unit just sitting.

Well, for what it is worth in 2002 my husband and business partner got colon cancer. It was in a lymph node. He underwent major surgery. It was not good. But he, unusual man that he is, would not recognize that position and as we journeyed each day to chemo we continued with our business. He managing and I painting and never stopping, we continued right on through the 2003 SURTEX and right on to the next major surgery. It was in his liver. He underwent another major operation and I made deals in the hospital parking lot. Neither of us stopped. We went right on to the 2004 SURTEX and the next major surgery. That was by pass heart surgery for 5 major arteries. We both continued to work through all of this.

You see there was a lot of mania and a lot of roller coaster emotions for me and try as I did. I could not keep my head above the ‘water’. I packed up every thing, gave away truck loads of manufacturers samples to people and to Goodwill. Then I sold everything I would not need and we moved to the Smoky Mountains. I have skipped over this fairly smoothly. My dear strong willed husband weathered it all and came through it all successfully and with his life even as I speak. But for me, well, I had an episode.

We used to wonder just what my capacity was. That was it. I was unable to go to SURTEX in 2006 and 2007 and just like if you put your hand in a bucket of water and removed it, that was the way it was when I was unable to attend. Since then it has been like trying to breathe in quicksand.

I am trying to find my way back to painting. Painting everyday but painting with a different mind. Painting as I used to paint when I painted my emotions. I still hunger and thrust after the excitement and the forum, the opportunities, the exhibition.
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