Recovery and reflection

With the Glasgow Design and Style Guide at the printer and the Chicago Pipe Show over, I'm trying to cross the bridge to a more reasonable schedule. Premier's Designer Meeting is still ahead, only two weeks from now, and there's still plenty to prepare for, and my daughters graduate from high school in the midst of that, so it's still a busy time. But I'd rather that than a long, empty stretch ahead.

For me, and I know for many people, there is a letdown after a sustained creative push. I want to enjoy some kind of satisfaction with what I've produced, and instead I find myself floating in apathy. I can't even call it depression, because I am unable to be enthusiastic or care much about things that normally engage me, although clinicians might differ with me. It's more like being in a spacesuit with the umbilical cord to the mother ship severed, tumbling away in slow motion, watching with detachment and devoid of emotion.

The Glasgow work is the best design I've produced in my career. I should be thrilled. But the passion that went into its creation seems like something from another life, and instead of feeling it, I'm looking at it as though someone else had the experience.

During the exhibition hours in Chicago, I spent two days showing people the Susquehanna Pipe Chest, watching them marvel at its design, beautiful materials and impeccable craftsmanship. It was nice, but I felt curiously disengaged. I enjoyed being with friends and acquaintances there yet felt tired and distant. The many compliments I heard for the chest and my drawings should have been wonderful. I did have some good conversations with old and new friends. But somehow, most of the time, I just couldn't connect with people the way I'd hoped to. Not through any lack of interest or enthusiasm on their part. I was off. It was me.

I'm sure that some of my close friends will tell me, if they read this post, that it is unwise to reveal this kind of thing so publicly. Perhaps so. A blog isn't supposed to be a diary, and it's presumptive to think that people are interested in, as a good friend puts it, "my pathetic life". Yet in a way, I think I'm looking for connection, trying to reel myself back from the empty, dimensionless void I'm floating in. I want to believe that some of you who are reading this, and have experienced similar, will feel less alone and isolated. And if there is only one thing that I've learned as I reflect on other times I've been here, it's this: if I keep moving, I'll find myself at some unpredictable and unexpected moment out in the brilliant sunshine, vibrantly happy, filled with energy, ready to charge into the next creative swell, and grateful to be alive and aware.

my familiar morning mug with a Bill Shalosky bent author, a Chicago show gift from my friend Neill Roan

Final stretch

Just four days from now, my graphic designer cohort Tad Herr and I will present the Glasgow Design Guide to our client, Premier Custom-Built. The book describes and illustrates this cabinet design series in fully digitally rendered form, a first for us. I've been ambivalent about leaving behind the hand drawings that have been my presentation form for these books for so many years, but given the subtle details of the Glasgow design and the more marketing focused intention of the book, computer modeling and rendering is the most effective medium this time. But it is not without art - the renderings are lighted and composed not so much to mimic photography as to convey a rich, almost surreal sense of what the design is about. We're excited about how it's shaping up, and I look forward to previewing it with our client on Wednesday afternoon.

Then, before 6AM Thursday morning, I'll climb into my car and set out on the twelve hour drive to St. Charles, Illinois for the Chicago Pipe Show. This year, I'm bringing the beautiful Susquehanna Pipe Chest that Wayne Ritchie and I just completed a few weeks ago for Neill Roan. It will be on display (under my watchful eye to ensure that it is not carelessly handled or damaged) along with a couple of my framed pipe related drawings. With the past few months a blur of long work days finalizing the Glasgow design series for its late May rollout, a couple of days relaxing and socializing with other enthusiasts of this eccentric fixation on pipes and tobacco will be a welcome respite.

I hear AutoCAD and Photoshop calling, so time to wrap this up and get back to work!

Glasgow kitchen, modeled and rendered in AutoCAD

detail of the pipe chest and cradles

this morning's riverside pipe scrawl before work

Update on Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 5:48PM by Scott A. Stultz

I'm fortunate that Tad's studio is only perhaps a quarter mile from mine, because I've been back and forth between the two places a dozen times a day or more for the past week or so. Tad is placing the final page titles, text, and captions into the now nearly completed layout, and having delivered the last of it to him late this afternoon along with the final illustrations, I have the evening to write the essay that introduces and explains Glasgow and its place in the world of architectural design. I don't think I've ever been quite this excited about a product series.

Rainy Sunday

I'm sure that there's a song with that title. Probably following some theme of lost love or some kind of romantic relationship angst. But this grey morning, it's reassuring to me that the air is damp and chilly and heavy with the portent of more rain. Too many days beginning with t-shirt temperatures at this time of the year feels unsettling, as pleasant as it is from a purely sensory perspective. My stormy 18 year old daughter Noble likes this kind of weather, and tells me that sunny days are depressing. I suspect that what she really means is that fair skies every day seems disconnected from the constantly changing moods that drive her reality. I think what she's saying is that one is meaningless without the other. That feels pretty real to me.

With the Chicago Pipe Show less than two weeks away, the scrawl is for my friends who come here to look at drawings with pipes in them, which I've not done lately with the exception of the cover for Pipes and Tobaccos magazine. I guess I need the variety, too.

Rad Davis horn/eskimo on a damp log by the river, 8 x 5, Derwent Inktense pencils

Morning air

For the longest time, I have harbored a nostalgic memory of my walks up over the hill that traversed the pasture and down into the woods that bordered it at the edge of the 28 acre central New York farm that I grew up on. I often wish that I could be twelve or fourteen years old again, just discovering my love for the quiet solitude of the place where I spent so much of my youth, walking around with a sketchbook and carbon pencils and hard pastels in an army surplus canvas bag, feeling the rich privilege of being unencumbered by the demands of adult life.

This morning, walking back in the cool air from what has become my favorite morning seat, a tree trunk that fell in the woods here by the Susquehanna a few seasons ago, I became suffused with a feeling of comfort and familiarity that took me back to those days so many years ago, and I realized that this place has grown in my heart, a live and present experience alongside the memories that I so cherish. It has begun to feel like home.

cluster of trees by a misty river, 8 x 5, Faber Castell colored pencils

Five

I'm generally up shortly after 5AM most mornings for the past two months. Early for some, not so much for others. A month into the calendar season of spring, daybreak comes earlier every day, and if I'm to experience it out in the air instead of filtered through the windows inside our house, I have to be up, dressed, make Gabe his breakfast, brew coffee, and be out the door before the bus picks him up for school at 6:45AM. Of course, my friends at Premier are already well into their work day by that time, but then most of them aren't still at it shortly before midnight, so I ought not feel like a slacker.

Anyway, the walk to the river has become a habit now - how long it will last is anyone's guess, but the effect on me is cumulative. My little places that I visit, and the path I follow, have become familiar and comforting. The changes each day are subtle, but blossoms that were bursting and vivid a week ago fall away and are overtaken by new growth. So I pay attention to these small moments. Yesterday I noticed a cluster of wild violets with delicate five petaled blossoms, white with stains of an indescribable soft blue and hearts of that delicate spring green. Today I sat down next to them with my pocket sized sketchbook and Faber Castell pencils in elementary school colors. I thought I'd drawn five of the flowers (a favorite number of mine by Japanese superstition, and that's how many petals there are). But when I got back here to the studio and looked closely, I saw that there is a sixth one. What we want to preserve is fleeting. What we experience changes in a moment.