I have been remiss. But I’m back and there is a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon including a move a year ago from Reno, Nevada to Fredericksburg , Texas.

So, to make a long story short, I am about to open my own gallery/studio by the end of May in Johnson City, Texas. I hesitate to post any pictures until the place gets it’s new facelift and I’m all settled in. But I may break down and post some teasers if I can’t hold back from excitement. Let me just say that it has been quite a year and i owe much of the success to my friend Linda Haddock who owns ECHO , in Johnson City, and was good enough to house Studio Massaro within her fabulous big building at 100 Nugent Avenue for this past year. Without her encouragement and great location in the up and coming new art community I would not be having the success I have been enjoying and now this next big step.

If you have been following my journey on this website, this next comment should come as no surprise … to end is to begin.

My year of a ‘studio without walls‘ is going very well. Of course the beautiful weather contributes to working on anything outside, but that has not kept me from sketching and drawing on location whether it be camping or nightclubs. I laughed when I recently read an article where the author posed the question, “In this age of digital media, are we taking too many pictures?”

I confess, I still take lots of pictures, but I do reference them and often. But executing a drawing, or painting while on location is an entirely different experience.  It’s immersing yourself in the scene, looking very, very closely at your subject, taking in the overall feel of the space and environment. It appears to be  a much more personal moment than the camera in that the  result  captures the ‘hand of man’ in a way that is undeniably tied to the artist.  Mostly it’s the knowledge that ‘time’ plays a very specific role in a drawing or painting, and rarely do people recognize the time it takes to survey a scene, find a unique point of view, and then capture a moment that will be lost in an instant with a camera. What most people fail to recognize is the time it takes the person behind the camera to make the decision to snap that image. Maybe what I am talking about here is intention. A photographer has a deeper intention behind the lens than the masses of people behind their smartphones,  iPads, and digital cameras . So perhaps to answer that authors question, ” … are we taking too many pictures?”  I would say –  yes. At least without the proper intention.

But I am  also speaking from an artists’ point of view. It cannot hurt to consider  for a moment, what you miss when you are busy trying to ‘get the shot’ instead of experiencing the moment more deeply.  Be mindful that you don’t substitute the moment for the shot. Try at least to be in the moment, locking it into  memory and then taking the shot. Don’t remove yourself from that moment where you have connected to something meaningful. To lose the experience but freeze the moment seems like cheating yourself out of life.

My ‘studio without walls’ year is waking me up again in a most stimulating way. My feet rest solidly on the ground and I’m finding great pleasure in experiencing moments in a very deep and thoughtful way.

PHOTO CREDIT – Sarah Cowen  ( shot with the most excellent intention)

I’m standing in my garage looking at everything that was previously in my Reno studio. The sight of my ‘ art stuff ‘ relegated to a cold , dirty, dark, garage makes my head hurt. It’s a nightmare begging for organization. By choice I have given my studio space up to my step-son while he finishes his last year of college.

I have been without a studio before, so I am not terrorized by the loss of the work space itself, rather the assembled stacks of what I have deemed  necessities to create art. My first inclination is to pitch it all. My second is to organize it and find a way to walk out there and find it a pleasing environment. My third is simply to spend the year creating art outside of the studio. I am choosing the third option, though it will still necessitate me organizing the nightmare somewhat.

It’s easy to get too comfortable with our life. Stay in a routine … after all as humans we naturally look for patterns to organize our life around. So throwing my creative environment up in the air and seeing where it will land is alot like standing on a piece of ice as you feel it breaking away from the shore line. Still, I am, as is my wont, more excited about how I will adapt to the year rather than losing what was and standing outside of my comfort zone.

We get used to having  the familiar around us. It comforts us. It can also make us lazy. Forced out of the routine I created in my comfortable studio, I am now going back to the spontaneity of life drawing, location painting, photography and letting the outside world become my inspiration again rather than creating from within the walls of my studio. It’s suddenly exciting again to be working within a living , breathing event as it happens. And this summer when it’s time again for camping, the woods will be my studio. In truth, it’s like a rebirth of wonder to be free of the studio and engaged in the world outside.

So, I’m rolling with it. Do you have something in your path that seems like an obstacle? Life is now in session – don’t waste a minute of it.

You still have choices – go left or go right … or roll away the stone.

There are so many good art books out there. One of my favorites is, THE VIEW from the Studio Door, by Ted Orland. It’s a book on how artists find their way in an uncertain world.

Here is an excerpt that I found particularly valuable to me.

“…When it comes to making art, our intuition is often light – years ahead of our intellect… we sense the meaning of the world unconsciously and capture that meaning through our art – and then have to wait for our intellect to understand what we already knew.”

Something I learned in my last body of work, featured in this web site (TO END IS TO BEGIN) was to go with my intuition and not second guess either my motive or the outcome of the work. I just started doing it – one after the other for over a year and a half. It was only the following year that what I had created became clear to me. They still reveal things to me everyday.

( feature photo – Studio Massaro/ NV – interior, by Catherine Massaro)

Boy there was a great write up in the Sunday New York Times travel section on the beautiful Texas Hill Country. It’s filled with many of my favorite places around the area, but with only 36 hours and lots of roads to discover, many left out. Fredericksburg, in the hill country, happens to be the location of my winter home/studio. I don’t do winters anymore as it  seems I’ve spent a lifetime escaping winter. If New Mexico had no winter, I’d surely still be there, but Texas is where I would rather be when it gets cold. So around December in Reno, NV, I pack up and head to what Jeannie Ralston refers to:

“the Hill Country—being Texas at it’s finest—is like nowhere else in the world.”

Amen to that , sister.

(featured image – HILL COUNTRY HOMAGE , canvas collage by Catherine Massaro)