My husband always says ‘Stay busy, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, just stay busy’.  He usually pulls this advice out when I’m obsessing over something that I either have no control over or to which I can’t find a solution.  Sometimes he says it before I even know I’ve begun to obsess.  He also likes to tell me ‘When Candace is busy working on a project, any project, she isn’t worrying about all her projects.’

So while my physical body is back in the studio, my brain is in a million different places.  Somehow getting back to the project I left on my workbench has slipped from its previous top priority level.  This is part of the reason why I don’t have multiple projects on the go, I can be easily distracted (another thing my husband likes to say).  Typically, I work on one thing…obsessively, until it’s completed.  If I bounce to something new, I struggle to get back to the ‘other’ project, and so it sits unfinished until a looming deadline pushes it back onto my workbench.

Rather than obsess about not working on ‘the one I left behind’ I am choosing to act on my husband’s suggestion.  Stay busy.  A new project idea is coming to life on my bench with the cue for additional projects of a similar vein getting steadily longer.

What’s on my bench now is a personal farewell to the old, out of use, dock at the Gabriola ferry terminal.  Last summer it was being demolished, this spring…it’s gone.  Along with it, the Cormorants that used to sun themselves and dry their wings have also disappeared.  Now when I want to see them I’ll need to take our little (really little) dinghy around the island to the cliff face that acts as their home.  Until I get that chance, I’ll stay busy focusing my thoughts on the project in front of me and listing additional ideas in my trusty, ever present journal.

A tribute to the Ferry Terminal Cormorants has lead me to the start of a mixed media project.