![\"House](\"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/files\/2014\/01\/House-in-snow-1-14-sm-300x224.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
packed BACK up, drove 2200 miles, again.<\/span>But I had this idea that my marriage could be saved, and if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain. I tried to convince my husband to move there, even offered to support him so he could do the writing he chose, but I knew he couldn\u2019t do it. He\u2019s a fish out of water outside Greater Chicagoland. Or maybe the city limits plus Evanston.<\/p>\n Asked for and got a job my friend and colleague Eve Alfille\u2019 had offered me several years ago, being production manager at her business, Eve J Alfille\u2019 Gallery and Studio.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the bare bones, except to add that it didn\u2019t work, the marriage is no longer even on life support. One day I woke up and found that I didn\u2019t even want it any more. I am no longer a Married Person, though I am not divorced yet, largely on account of not wanting to lose my health insurance. Gotta do it, though, lawyers and all, bleaaaahhh!<\/p>\n OK, so now you\u2019re caught up, except for the parts of my story that may make it interesting to anyone but myself. I am proceeding on the assumption that my experiences are not unique, except in the particulars. As artists, we struggle to maintain income, inspiration, relationships, and mundane needs. It is never easy, harder in a poor economy.<\/p>\n So here\u2019s more about how this has gone\u2026<\/p>\n I learned at lot working for Jim. He has a very effective business model, for the type of work he does. Everything is Just In Time. He does not even order gold until a ring is bought, keeps almost no inventory. Almost nothing made on spec.<\/p>\n This is a model that can work if you are established, and if you are comfortable making fairly minor variations on a (successful) theme, such as different combinations of colored golds and other metals in a small handful of patterns, in several widths and profiles. Jim is amazing at CAD, so he can create files for growing and casting unique and complex settings. He hates to hurry, so he didn\u2019t expect me to\u2014he was fine with however long it took me to shave off minuscule bits of a ring until a setting fit perfectly into the band (you can\u2019t add back, with mokume gane, so you have to get it right the first time). I really liked the lack of rush and the high standard\u2014though by the same token, I felt the pressure to meet that standard very strongly, and there was no passing the buck, since I was the only one there. I loved learning to use a lathe and a mill and a pulse arc welder, though the first two don\u2019t seem to have a role in my own work. In my new(er) job, I have learned to use a laser, and that\u2019s an even cooler tool, but far too expensive for most independent jewelers. Dollar for dollar, the PUK is probably a better value.<\/p>\n Since I had not had a regular, wage-slave job my entire adult life, it was very hard to get used to, and I did not manage to go home and do my own work after working all day. I don\u2019t know how so many others manage to do this. Of course, I was also getting used to a new house, a new town, a new climate, trying to make new friends. I knew no one, couldn\u2019t get my favorite bread, my favorite frozen pizza, my favorite fruit. So I guess I shouldn\u2019t be too hard on myself.<\/p>\n I came back to live in the house I raised my kids in, and I\u2019m still in it. My husband eventually moved out, so I\u2019m in a 9-room house alone, trying to fix it up to sell. Trying to establish new friends, since most of \u201cour\u201d friends got used to being \u201chis\u201d friends while I was gone. More to the point, I feel pretty much like a different person, and I\u2019m trying to figure out how THAT works. Point being, I\u2019m still not managing to do my own work. I worked for Jim for under a year, and I\u2019ve been at my new job for just over a year and a half.<\/p>\n This just won\u2019t do.<\/p>\n How can an artist figure out a new, updated identity without doing his\/her own work?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the bottom line for me right now, if you managed to stay with me through all the prologue. It\u2019s a little hard to come out and say this, but I think it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n Artists need to be self-centered to do art. It\u2019s a very internal process. I have not been nearly self-centered enough for many years, focusing on my marriage and raising four (amazing, fabulous, worth-it) kids. Not that I haven\u2019t done some good work, I believe I have. But the kids are off having their own lives, the marriage is over\u2026 Now should be the time to really be the artist I truly am. I MUST figure out how to create the environment I need to do that. I need a place to live that feeds my soul, with a community that will allow me to support myself with my art and feed my belly. I am trying to figure out where that is. I can go anywhere that feels right. Evanston is far too urban for me, and too expensive. Bellingham is all I could wish for aesthetically, but I can\u2019t figure out how the artists there keep body and soul together, in that economy. I\u2019m open to suggestion, and I\u2019d love to hear from you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are a few of you out there who have been gracious enough to notice that I\u2019ve been silent a long time and to wonder what happened to me. Thank you. Really.\u00a0First off, I am still here and kicking! Not dead, not gone, but life continues to throw me curves and I continue to try […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5,8],"tags":[13,14,15,112,113,118,28,116,46,117,55,111,115,104,114],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/noel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}