Melinda R. Smith

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Oh, well, I guess there is nothing. On this morning, as the light is coming up, there is nothing. It is a wan, nothing-color light that is low in the east. There are telephone poles against this light, and wires. I see these things through a loading-dock door/window that is my only window. There are other things I can see, but they are not worth mentioning. It is not an edifying view. It is Saturday morning. Of all the mornings, I find Saturdays the most difficult mornings to be a painter. It will pass, as Saturday mornings do—in fact, as all mornings do—but while it is here, this difficulty, it is a difficulty not unlike the inability to breathe. There is so much to do, it is not as if I do not have a thousand things to do—on this morning, I plan to prepare paper, for instance, and this will involve stretching it, cutting it, and then brushing onto it first an acrylic medium and then clear gesso, which gives it tooth and grain. I will also stretch two canvases, on which I will be painting two "Red Eye" paintings to send east (I am being uncharacteristically specific!), and I will also begin the very early work on a large new "window" or "stage" painting, which I am also sending east. This will be the work I do in the morning, which precedes the actual work of painting. Also, I am doing this, I am telling you things, which is a thing I love. It does not matter, however, that I have all these things to do, and that I more or less love every task. It is an unease that fills me, a loneliness, the loneliness of the insistence on solitude my particular form of being an artist takes. I wish it were otherwise, but it is not. Most days, I do not feel this unease. I am happy to report that on most days, I do not feel this unease. But Saturdays wheel around to themselves again and again and again, and then I feel the unease, the unsettling unsettlement of never settling, never settling, never settling. Already, in the very early hours before the light came up, already I have felt envy and desire and regret. After all, there was not nothing; there was this.