Apifera Farm - where art, story, animals & woman merge. Home to artist Katherine Dunn

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Monday, December 07, 2015

Looking East



As as I ponder how to pack Earnest's suitcase, there are many holiday gifts for your animal and farm loving friends and family, like this print. Visit the shop and enjoy your time there. In one way or another it will help The Misfit get to Maine!

Perhaps once a person makes up their mind they are heading East, everything points in that direction. I didn't set out to make Blue Horse face East, he just did. Some cynic might say that if he is standing at a certain point of the property maybe he is facing West. Nope, he is facing East.

So I looked at a bunch of pieces I did back when Maine was only a percolation and I or Martyn didn't have the confidence to speak of it out in the open, and it seemed the art that struck chords with me at the time I finished them, had Eastward faces. Then I thought I should go back and look at paintings I did when I was still in Minneapolis, and was feeling a pull from the West-and many of those pieces had the faces pointing West.

I suppose it is a bit like what Richard Pryor said-that when you have a broken heart everything is sad, even if it is the song on the radio like "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer". And when you are being pulled East, faces look East. I have one foot here and one foot there. This too shall pass.

A person told me the other day she didn't believe a person is "pulled East or West", but that you simply make a decision to go and you go. She didn't believe "things fall into place" just because you are on the right path, she felt you made things fall into place. She also has never felt wing nubs on her shoulders. I said,

"Perhaps."

I know there are all sorts of things that have to happen before I'm sitting in a truck hauling a bunch of short statured goats and some pigs to Maine. But I feel very positive about it all. There will pit stops, and closed doors here and there. Selling a country place is different than selling in the city, that is certain. I have sold six houses on my own in my adult life and was lucky to have a lot of experience too as I was growing up as my parents' moved a lot. I know how to pack a good box. My mother had a go-to line when we would put a house on the market,

"They always sell. Only takes one buyer."

We listed this weekend and I hope to get to a place where I can regain some footing in the studio. But there are so many details and logistics to this move and it might be my biggest creation to date, and I must possible just accept that, and enjoy it as much as possible. We have some ideas on hauling-and to be honest, I think it is going to be the experience of a life time. Someone suggested it will be a great book-true, however it is an awfully expensive and uprooting way to get a book idea!