Mixed

Written by Hannah Streefkerk. Posted in Hannah Streefkerk

Today I am tired and my blogpost will not be so long. I worked today as a slöjd teacher in a grundskola. And it is not that I don’t like my job, because I really like it and I work on the best school, but… Many artist probably will recognize what I am going to write now. When you feel an artist inside you would like to work all the time with that. I always get mixed in my head. One side of me wants only to work with art, but because I can not live from my artworks, I have to have a job next to it. When I work somewhere else I can not spend as much time on my own work as I would like. And because of that maybe the quality of my works get lower, and maybe therefore I can not live of my work..and so on , and so on. Maybe this is the chicken-egg story.

At the other hand, when I imagen only to work for my art and not have a side job, then I will miss a lot of contacts and social live. I like to hear my students point of view and sometimes new ideas get born during my work in school, because of responses of students. At the moment I work 3 days in the week in school. That’s good for me. I just earn enough to pay my living costs and I have time to work on my own work. But even when it seems to be in balance, sometimes my head thinks different. Like now, I would like to test more work with the lav, but friday evening will be the first free moment…and then we have the next dilemma: family..how much time do I want to spend with them. It is also very nice to have some nice time together with my sambo and the children.

I don’t want to complain at all. I think I have the two best jobs ever and I have the nicest family, but just sometimes it crashes a bit in my brain. What are my priorities…?