Sunshine Variations

This began as an attempt to make a sunset, but turned into a sunrise instead. I’d never seen a project like this before, which meant, as is often the case, that I had to play with it and see what worked. Something  you can’t see here are the four top pie sections that I had to take out because they made the upper half-circle go past the straight mark in the middle.

I had originally planned to put the half-circle in my front foyer, where the two-story meets the top floor and there was for several years an empty space, waiting for a properly sized piece to go there. It would have been a nice spot, but ultimately, I decided to add the bottom section and it became a (somewhat) traditional afghan.

For most of 2023, I was clinically depressed. I reached a point where I told one of my therapists (the expensive one) about how often I thought about wishing I was dead (over a hundred times a day). I didn’t tell her the full truth about how close I’d come to making a plan (I was toying with several different methods to achieve the desired end). Her reaction was immediate and appropriate in many ways. She didn’t call the police, but she did call my primary care physician and insisted he needed to schedule an appointment with me that day so I could start on a medication. Unfortunately, the medication I did try wasn’t helpful at all, as has been the case with every depression/anxiety medication I’ve tried. Mostly, they make me nauseous and make food taste bad. So I know they’re working. Just not—in a way I want.

I made sunshine projects as a kind of art therapy to try to force myself to think less about wishing I was dead. It wasn’t so much that I was happy when I was creating this as that I became less depressed when my lap was covered in variations on the color yellow. And once the top section was finished, the bottom section was easy and almost mindless to complete. It lay on my bed for some months before I decided that I was going to move my desk outside of the big, walk-in closet where I’d had it for over a year (I’d bought the house with this intention because the closet was so big, but it turned out that I decided a window with light coming in might be good for my depression). So the afghan went up on the wall right next to my desk, around the corner by the absurdly, obnoxiously yellow curtains there. I have slightly less yellow curtains downstairs which my son hates.

After I finished this project, I tried several others with the same theme. One is a set of smaller sun half-circles squared up in black. It hung up on a wall for a few months before I took it down. There was also an attempt at making just the half-circle for the foyer, but again, I over-ran the circle part and it went to the rubbish heap, more of a skirt than a wall piece. This is the problem with creating things without a pattern. You make mistakes and then you have to decide if you’re going to throw them out, start over, or work on something else entirely. Not every project works. If half of them work well enough to hang up even for a month or two, you’re doing well. No one sees the projects that didn’t turn out, which I suspect leads to many non-artists imagining that the magic of being an artist is that you always get it right (usually the first time). These essays are on one level an attempt to disabuse anyone watching of that notion.

Failure is an integral part of success. No one likes to fail. No one is proud of failure. Failures aren’t put up on museum walls. But you know what? They should be

.