I'll call you in 15 minutes

I’ll call you in 15 minutes
Studio time is like being suspended in a long ship at the edge of a black hole (yes…I am a huge Dr. Who fan for those that got that reference). Danny would leave for work at 6:00 AM, “I’ll call you in 15 minutes”. He makes his call at 12:00 noon.  “Its 15 minutes you need to eat now!”  He gets me and Yes Studio time is different.
 I often am told I am a very intense person. Soooo serious about my art that my friend and mentor Clint Hamilton used to introduce me at shows with “she gets right to God and Death”  “Enjoy”  
Artists in popular myth are portrayed as eccentric, odd, and very, very intense.  It is said they see things differently. That it is by some sort of alchemy that they do what they do.  Fiction or fact?  For me it feels like fact. No matter, good story.
I told my mother I was going to be an artist at 5.  What does a 5 year old think an artist is?   I have no idea, but I was a very serious child. By 11 or 12 I had this romantic idea of the suffering artist.   All the  stories I read seemed to convey all the great artists suffered.  And who were my artists?  Poe and Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Goya. They all died young and they were amazing!  I would lie awake at night and think “If I want to be a real artist, I must suffer.” Ah teen angst. This is also about the time I started to believe I would die before I was thirty…..which I also told my mother … as I was - a very serious child.  Let me just say that when I turned 30 and I was still alive, well it was a bit anticlimactic and quite frankly embarrassing.  Friends I hadn’t seen in ages checked in with wow …still alive?  They actually threw me a party; all the balloons and plates were black. And I was left with “ ah well, keep painting”.
Which brings me to the great realization:
I am very serious….. but I’m just kinda goofy.
And maybe I think, maybe that’s ok.