Health, Artist Block, and the future of Redmoon Studios

It’s taken me 8 months to shore up the courage to write this out, not out of indifference to the situation but largely because of fear & sadness that it’s still going on. If you have been visiting the website for updates (or had given up months ago and just happened to stop by at the right time), you may have noticed that around October 2017, I had some big plans and big ideas about how I wanted the website to continue — I was hunting for a nice new layout, had a store in mind, was working on my other etsy projects… Suffice to say, life does not always go as planned.

Due to personal family issues, a poor local job market, health problems from long, high levels of daily stress, I basically crashed. Not crashed in a way that you flop yourself on the bed at the end of a shite day, or find a home in a pint of something while you binge-watch Youtube for 5 hours straight. Crash in the sense that a car crashes, or a train derails, or you literally pass out after 3 days of not sleeping. Crash in a way that is as physically jarring as it is psychologically jarring.

It is now August 2018 (almost) and I can safely say that I have not produced any art since October of 2017.

I could spend hours writing up an entry about all of the factors that have made this happen, but in the almost-year since it has occurred, I realize that it wouldn’t change anything and it wouldn’t make the struggle of not being able to produce anything feel any more founded. It feels more like the setup to a philosophical question, “What do you call the period of time in which an Artist fails to Art?” Is it a hiatus, even if its not planned? Is it an Art Block if it’s not from lack of ideas, but from lack of being able to make them manifest? I can’t really get any new viewers (or as I’ve found, charge any Patreon patrons) if I’m not creating new things, or going to conventions, or showing that I’m active in any new way. I can’t really start any new projects or partnerships if the thing I am trying to share is not actively being made.

So I have been thinking: Should I keep this website? Should I leave it up as the bones of an aging dinosaur so people can see things that I did? For those who are reading this, the answer is ‘for the moment, yes.’ But I don’t know what the long term of that is. I don’t know when I will be able to start making new art, let-alone making new art that I feel comfortable sharing– or, perhaps, is a quality I feel worth sharing. I am leaving up old gallery images and the like for now in hopes that at least people can see that at one point, I was able Art. When that may come back & to what extent it does, I don’t know.

There is a deep hope that in having to go through this period of loss and stagnation that I will have a better appreciation for whatever ends up coming out of the end of it. In the meantime, I ask for your patience and tenderness with me while I am feeling as vulnerable as I have been for the last year.