WHAT AUGUST TAUGHT ME ABOUT MAKING — AND STOPPING
There is a version of an artist's life that looks like constant production.
One piece finished, the next one already begun.
No pauses. No gaps.
Just output, always output.
That is not my August.
And I have stopped pretending it should be.
THE BOTTLE IS DONE
I finished Black and White Bottle No. 1 in late July.
Black, white, and rose gold seed beads — every surface covered, including the neck fringe and the stopper ball. Geometric pattern repeating all the way around. One composition, designed together, built together.
It took longer than I planned.
It came out better than I imagined.
That is the only honest way I know how to describe finishing a piece.
When it was done I put it on the shelf and looked at it for a while.
Walked around it.
Looked at it again.
That is the whole reward.
Just standing there, knowing that this thing did not exist before,
and now it does,
and your hands made it.
Black and White Bottle No. 1 is available in the Dequa Design shop now.
One of one.
It will not be made again.
THEN I WENT SWIMMING
After the bottle was done, I did something I almost never do.
I stopped.
Not because I had to.
Because I needed to.
I went outside.
I got in the pool.
I let the Florida heat do what Florida heat does in August —
which is remind you that you are a body,
not just a pair of hands attached to a mind attached to a work table.
I swam.
I sat in the sun.
I read.
I let the beads wait.
And here is what I know after forty years of making things:
the work does not suffer when you step away from it.
The work waits.
And when you come back,
you come back with something you did not have before.
Attention. Freshness. A cleared eye.
The bead break was not lost time.
It was part of the process.
A QUIET BEGINNING
When I came back to the studio,
I did not go back to B Rabbit.
Not yet.
Instead I started something smaller.
Something private.
Something I have been thinking about for a long time.
I am making a beaded book — a letter holder, really —
for my granddaughter.
She turns two in August.
The cover will be a girl in jeans carrying flowers.
The back will be a dramatic face — black, white, red lips.
Inside, when it is finished, will be a letter she opens when she is eighteen.
And a necklace.
And whatever else I want her to have from me,
whenever that day comes.
I am not in a hurry with this one.
It will take as long as it takes.
Some things are not made for the shop.
Some things are made for one person,
and that person is not born yet into the fullness of who she will be.
I bead a little.
I think about what I want to say to her.
I bead a little more.
B RABBIT WAITS
He is still there on the worktable.
The fleur-de-lis jacket in crimson and gold,
the gold eyelashes,
the rhinestone ears.
He is patient in the way that tricksters are patient —
which is to say, he is not patient at all,
he is simply biding his time.
I will be back.
September, most likely.
The jacket will get finished.
The arms will be next.
The front vest and shirt after that.
B Rabbit has been waiting since spring.
He can wait a little longer.
WHAT AUGUST IS FOR
I have been making art long enough to know
that the seasons matter.
Not in a precious way.
In a real way.
August in Florida is fierce.
The heat is not gentle.
It asks something of you —
a kind of surrender to the slowness of things.
You cannot rush August.
You cannot work your way through it by force.
So I swam.
I started something tender and private.
I let the big ambitious piece rest.
And I am going back into September
with more in me than I had in July.
That is the whole point.
That is what August is for.
Cheers!
Dequa
