What Shift Work Does to a Creative Practice
What Shift Work Does to a Creative Practice
I work three days, three nights, and six days off. Except getting that six off is never a guarantee. Add in travel and football and time turns into my most valuable asset.
On paper this schedule should be terrible for a creative artistic practice. And in some ways it is. There's no consistent rhythm or flow. I have no reliable window of when I will get time to get projects done. None of the Monday morning studio time with a warm cup of coffee in some picture of what you think the start of the week for an artist should look like and happens every week without fail. My body is perpetually confused about what time it is and honestly I couldn’t tell you what day it is today. My creative clock blasts a reminder whenever it feels like it, which is not always when I have time to use it.
What I've learned is that fighting the schedule is a losing game. It leaves me burned out and irritable and working with it is the only option to keep some sense of sanity.
Early mornings are for writing and thinking. The quiet before a day shift starts, or the hour before a night shift starts. When my day just starts and my brain is still too tired to filter the true me. That's when the ideas arrive. I keep a notebook nearby at all times because if I don't catch them when they come then they're gone by the time I have time to flush them out completely.
Late evenings are for making. The physical act of painting happens best when the day's obligations are done and the pressure is off. There's no one to answer to in those late hours, no phone calls, no emails and only the occasional text from a friend in distant time zones. The studio is mine and I am at its service.
The longer stretches off, when I get them, are for the sustained paint work. The big pieces. The collections. The things that need more than an hour of focus at a time.
What this produces is a feast and famine pattern that looks chaotic from the outside and truly can be from the inside at times. Long silences on social media followed by a flurry of photo dumps. Weeks where nothing visible happens to those not in my immediate vicinity followed by weeks where everything does. This is not an act of inconsistency. It's a different kind of song that sings to the heart of an artist.
The work happens in the margins. It always has and I've stopped apologizing for that.
Jackie
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