Spinning Gold

Before you decide what kind of artist you are, something gets your attention.

You see a paint color and immediately want to know its name. You take four photographs of the same wall because the light has changed the pattern of shadows on the plaster. You hear six notes in a song and continue thinking about them for the next eleven years. An artist’s work makes you feel jealous in a way that is almost embarrassing. You pick up a piece of cloth in a shop, rub it between your fingers, put it down, and then walk back for it ten minutes later without any idea what you are going to do with it.

The Greeks had a word for the desire that seizes us this way: himeros.

In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphrodite usually sends this force through the world. She causes gods to mingle with mortals. She moves through birds and animals and people. Then Zeus turns her own power upon her. Aphrodite sees Anchises tending cattle on Mount Ida and is seized by the same desire she usually creates in someone else.

She does not sit down and make a sensible list of reasons to want him. The sight of him produces desire before she has decided what the desire means or what it will require of her.

Most makers know what it is to want to move closer to something before they know what they want to make from it. You do not reason your way into loving the thing. It gets your attention first, and your desire to move closer gives you a reason to begin learning.

The trouble is not that these moments have never happened to you. The trouble is that they happen in the middle of a life that is very good at interrupting them.

Something catches you, and almost immediately the questions begin. Is this useful? Could I sell it? Is it real art?

Would becoming good at it make me look like the kind of artist I want other people to see?

Before you have spent ten minutes with the desire itself, it is being asked to justify the time, money, difficulty, and public identity that might come with following it.

Sometimes we confuse admiration with instruction. You can admire the command another artist has over a difficult material without wanting to spend your own life developing that command.

You can love the audacity or technical precision of the work and still feel bored, cramped, or miserable when you try to make that way. You can be drawn to the attention surrounding an artist and mistake that attention for evidence that you should want what she has made.

And we carry ideas about what counts. The strange little collages you want to make do not feel serious enough, so you sign up for a course in observational drawing. The poems come easily, which makes you suspicious of them, while the technically impressive thing that leaves you cold receives all of your discipline.

You keep focusing on the appearance of what an artist should be (usually based on other peoples’ ideas and definitions), instead of paying attention to what you cannot stop loving.

So you save the image and keep scrolling. Or you rush toward the nearest recognizable version of the desire: the fashionable material, the impressive artist, the class that promises a finished project.

There may be a real strand of attraction inside that choice, but you have not yet worked out which strand it is. When the material arrives, you may discover that you do not enjoy touching it. When the class ends, you know how to make the teacher’s project and have no idea what you want to do next.

Another day ends without you making much at all. There were too many possible directions, no way to choose between them, and nobody standing beside you with the next instruction.

Or you did make something by following another person’s method exactly, and the result does not feel like yours.

This makes practice very difficult. Practice toward what?

Repetition is easier to tolerate when it is carrying you toward something you love. When the only aim is to become skillful enough, impressive enough, legitimate enough, every bad drawing or awkward first attempt feels like evidence that you are failing to become the artist you had in mind.

The desire was already difficult to trust before the practice began. It has been judged, moderated by somebody else’s opinion, and pushed toward whatever looks most recognizably artistic from the outside. It has not received enough of your attention for you to know what it is asking you to move toward.

The room full of possible selves

For a long time, I had a box.

The box came down whenever I bought a class or tutorial. I would work at the thing for a few weeks. Sometimes I completed every assignment and then lost all momentum when the instructions stopped.

Sometimes the material felt terrible in my hands, even though I loved what somebody else could do with it. Sometimes I became frustrated by my own lack of skill and quietly moved on before I had to see too much evidence that I was not naturally good at it.

Everything went back into the box.

At one point I owned somewhere around five hundred watercolors. I had six or seven brands of graphite pencils, which is an absurd collection for someone who eventually had to admit she did not like working in graphite. Once I made that discovery, I immediately began looking for the right charcoal.

I had watercolor pencils and markers, gouache, stacks of paper, more brushes than I could reasonably use, and all the materials belonging to different artists I might become one day.

I was not buying these things thoughtlessly. I was trying very hard.

I believed that if I took the right class or found the right material, the work might finally come out of me looking the way it looked in my head. One of these purchases would shorten the distance. One of these teachers would help me skip the humiliating middle where I knew what good work looked like but could not make it yet.

I wanted to make myself impregnable to anything uncomfortable or painful or challenging, before I began showing up as an artist.

There was also real pleasure in the buying. A new material gives you a clean beginning. While you are comparing pigments or waiting for a parcel to arrive, you get to feel the anticipation of making without having to confront a surface that may not cooperate with you.

The possible painting is still perfect. Your future relationship with the material contains no disappointment yet.

And if you have the money, buying something is one of the easiest ways to give yourself temporary permission. The supply proves that you intend to make. The class puts creative time on the calendar. For a few weeks, your desire receives a legitimate place in your life.

Then the temporary structure disappears, and the supplies remain.

I know makers who have an entire craft room they avoid entering because opening the door means standing in front of every month and year they did not make, surrounded by several hundred pounds of evidence that they meant to.

There is a digital version of this room too. Thousands of saved images across four platforms. Books bought with real conviction and never opened. Tutorials bookmarked for the day you are finally ready. An ideas folder that became so large you started another ideas folder because finding anything in the first one was impossible.

It is easy to look at this accumulation and see waste, inconsistency, or a lack of discipline.

The accumulation usually begins in real desire.

By the time I finally stopped acquiring watercolors, this book contained more than 500 different paint swatches. I literally treated them like Pokémon cards.

There was often something true inside the attraction: a color relationship, an atmosphere, the scale of the work, a way of moving across a surface.

I kept mistaking the clue for the entire answer. If I loved one quality in an artist’s work, I tried to adopt her material, her method, and her idea of what the finished work should be.

Buying and researching slowly became ways of preparing forever because preparation felt safer than making badly in public—or even making badly in front of myself. They also allowed me to postpone the harder question: what, exactly, did I love enough to keep following once nobody else was telling me how?

The first time I knew what I was aiming toward

After spending years accumulating watercolors, I had to admit that I didn’t actually enjoy conventional watercolor painting. I needed a process that felt instinctual and immediate but still let me work back and forth, change my mind, and fix what wasn’t working.

The painters I had come to love the most all worked in oil paint. So it felt inevitable I would eventually return to oil painting, the first painting medium I had learned as a child. I couldn’t afford to buy an entirely new set of materials, so I began messing around with the watercolor, gouache, and Aquapasto medium I already owned, trying to make them behave differently. It was slow and frustrating, and I kept circling back to the same thought: Maybe I should just buy the oil paints.

Before I had a chance to buy the oil paints, my health collapsed in a way I had never experienced before.

Suddenly oil paints were no longer an option due to my new health constraints. My world was becoming painfully small. For a while, I genuinely wondered whether my body was going to let me become a painter at all.

As I sat bedbound, having immune reactions to everything around me including minor temperature and weather changes, any kind of physical exertion, strong smells, and everything but 8 specific food ingredients… even as every day I deepened into the despair of my health spiraling out of control… The siren song of painting still kept playing in my heart.

Talk about a desire that haunts you even when it doesn’t make sense. It was maddening, but it was also a spark of starlight in the darkness I found myself swimming in.

I realized I had to try to do something, even if it meant only using what I had on hand. I wouldn’t let painting be ripped from my hands simply because oil paint was not an option, or because I was stuck in bed. I’d find a way to do it, even if it was hard or strange or no one else had done it before.

Little did I know this strange cocktail of despair and determination was a blessing in disguise.

My health limitations forced me to stop searching for the “right medium” and to stop looking to other people’s methods… and instead begin paying attention to what I was actually trying to do.

One day I pulled up a composition by one of my favorite painters and decided to make my own version of it. I changed the colors and began working with my own materials, in the method I had slowly, painfully, developed with water media rather than oil paints.

For the first time in weeks, I went into a flow state and got thoroughly lost in the work.

When I came out of it, I looked at my painting and… loved it!

Then I looked at his.

They did not resemble one another. Not slightly.

And… I still liked mine better!

That had never happened to me before!

After the initial shock wore off, I began taking the two paintings apart.

His felt like rock and roll. It was stark and rebellious, with something almost confrontational in it. I still loved it. It gave me the same forceful emotional response his paintings often do, a little like being punched squarely in the chest.

Mine was a storm too, but it did not feel dangerous in the same way. It felt like a breath being held before a crescendo. The motion was there, and so was the weather, but everything seemed suspended for a moment. When other people looked at it, they spoke about awe and love.

Why had I changed the emotional movement of the painting without deciding to? Why did I prefer the quieter tension of my version? What had satisfied me enough that I wanted to do it again?

Those questions opened the doors of my perception.

Some of the answers were inside the process. I liked bodily contact with a surface, laying paint down and pulling it back, letting an image emerge from the material instead of it melting together into one flat smoothness.

I wanted a method that left evidence of my hand. Those things mattered. If I disliked the activity itself, I would not stay with it long enough to do anything interesting.

But the deeper answer was emotional.

I was drawn to suspension: the intake of breath before something changes, movement held inside stillness, light that opens across the water for a few seconds and disappears. I loved storms, but I was not painting them to create danger. I was trying to make contact with the awe I felt while watching the sky change, the brief sense that an ordinary coastline had opened into another world.

Once I saw it, the same quality began appearing everywhere, going back to my childhood.

Turns out, I had been choosing the same emotional movement since I was a little girl.

The scattered strands started forming a golden thread.

And for the first time, I could enter the labyrinth of a creative project with some sense of what I was looking for. I still get lost. I still make unsuccessful work. Most of what I make does not completely satisfy me, and I expect that will remain true for the rest of my life.

But getting lost stopped meaning that I had chosen the wrong medium or did not have enough talent. I could measure what was happening. I could look at an unsuccessful painting and see that the surface was too smooth, that I need to push the values more to get the atmosphere I craved, or that the image had become loud rather than holding its breath. I knew what I was trying to move closer to.

That made the trouble of making meaningful.

It is difficult to translate something that lives in the mind, the body, the imagination, or the spirit into physical form. The material changes it. Your current skill changes it. Time, space, illness, money, and the size of the table change it.

Knowing your taste does not remove any of that difficulty.

But… it gives the difficulty a direction. It gives you something you love enough to remain a beginner for, to return when the material frustrates you, and to keep trying even when nobody praises the attempt.

This did not give me a tidy definition of my artistic identity. The thread is still revealing itself. I expect to spend a lifetime finding out how many forms that suspended, illuminated moment can take. That is part of the pleasure.

Himeros gives us something large enough to keep approaching through many works, many materials, and many stages of our lives. Each successful contact satisfies us for a moment without exhausting the desire itself.

Later, an allergy to gum arabic took away the water-media method I had developed and genuinely loved. That loss hurt, but it did not return me to the beginning. I had lost one vehicle for my vision. I had not lost the vision itself. For the first time in my life, a substantial challenge did not slow me down.

Instead, I picked up charcoal.

The medium changed, but the thread remained visible. Because I knew what I was pursuing, I could test the material against it and decide which new skills were actually worth learning.

This process—gathering the evidence, identifying the recurring qualities, choosing one strand, testing it against a material, and returning to it—became the foundation of Spinning Gold.

What is Spinning Gold?

Spinning Gold is a Venusian workshop and studio practice for gathering what arrests your attention into one place, where you can spend enough time with it to discover what keeps drawing you closer.

At its center is the Taste Altar: a physical, finite collection of the images, objects, words, influences, affinities, and refusals through which your taste begins to reveal itself.

You may already have much of this scattered through your life. There are photographs on your phone, saved images you meant to revisit, a passage you underlined years ago, materials you keep picking up, and old interests that have followed you through several apparently unrelated creative lives.

We will begin bringing some of these things together. You will practice looking closely enough to recognize which qualities hold your attention, and placing things beside one another to see where an unexpected kinship appears.

The two-hour live workshop on October 3 introduced the Taste Altar practice and four ways of looking more closely at what draws you. After the teaching, we turned off the recording for private questions and an hour of co-working to help participants get their Taste Altars started.

The teaching recording, transcript, and notes will be available in your Stan membership area within 48 hours, by October 5. Downloadable Taste Altar and Venusian Devotion guides will be posted there that day too.

From October 3 to November 21, we will work with the Taste Altar practice together in our private Discord. Each week, we will return to the workshop concepts through discussion, examples, questions, and what we are discovering in our own collections. You can share what you create and ask for help when you get stuck.

The supplementary studio workbook arrives on November 21, at the end of our time together. Until then, the Taste Altar is where I most want you to give your attention: gathering what draws you, looking again, and discovering what begins to connect.

The intention is to begin a collection you can keep tending: somewhere your desires receive enough attention for you to recognize them again, and gradually understand what you might want to make from them.

You are ready for Spinning Gold if…

• You have accumulated supplies, classes, saved images, half-started projects, and more possible directions than you know how to choose between.
• You are very good at being a student but struggle to keep making when there is no teacher assigning the next step.
• You start learning a medium, feel the discomfort of being a beginner, and quickly wonder whether your awkward first attempts prove that you are not really an artist.
• You know you are creative, even if the word artist still feels more difficult to claim.
• You are beginning again after illness, grief, care work, burnout, a major life change, or years in which your attention belonged primarily to other people.
• You have several mediums or interests and suspect there may be a deeper connection between them, but you cannot see it clearly yet.
• You believe that making belongs to the sacredness of your life and want to give it more than whatever time remains after everything else is finished.
• You want to make alongside people who will take your creative desire seriously without telling you what your taste should be.

Spinning Gold is built for painters, illustrators, photographers, poets, textile and fiber artists, collage and mixed-media makers, printmakers, ceramicists, sculptors, book makers, and people whose work moves between forms. The practice can hold interests across several mediums.

If your practice depends upon noticing, sensory choice, image, language, or material exploration, there is room for your work here.

You do not need to be a professional. You do not need to sell your work. You do not need a settled medium, a portfolio, or a coherent answer when someone asks what kind of art you make.

You need some curiosity about what has already been getting your attention, and a willingness to spend time with it.

A small world devoted to what you love

One of the things I loved about summer camp was the permission to become completely absorbed in something. For a while, you were surrounded by people who cared about it too. Your enthusiasm had somewhere to go.

I want to make a little room for that here.

Most of adult life arrives already marked as important. The work shift, the appointment, the bill, the person who needs help, the vacuuming that everyone can agree must eventually be done.

Creative time is often left unmarked and therefore becomes easy to move, shorten, or sacrifice.

From October 3 to November 21, we will have a shared place to bring what we are noticing. You might share a page from your Taste Altar, two images you suspect belong together, or a small experiment that surprised you. You might recognize something in another maker’s collection that helps you look at your own more closely.

The workshop and downloadable practice guides give you a way to begin at home. The community gives you people to talk with as you follow it—people who understand why you might want to spend an afternoon considering a particular shade of green.

The live workshop took place on October 3. After the recorded teaching, we turned off the recording for private Q&A and an hour of co-working to begin our Taste Altars together.

That part stays private. We may be sharing pieces of our creative worlds that are still tender or difficult to explain, and I want us to have room to do that without a recording running. Your camera can stay off, and you are welcome to work quietly alongside us. The Q&A and co-working will not be available as a replay.

The Discord invitation will be posted in your Stan membership area on October 3. Participation is optional, and you do not have to keep up with every conversation. Come into the room in a way that works for your life and capacity.

The Taste Altar begins with fifteen minutes

The Taste Altar is a physical, finite archive of what arrests your attention.

You can find the source online, but the thing you keep must leave the endless stream. You print the image. You copy the sentence by hand. You make the swatch, tear out the page, tuck the scrap of cloth into a pocket, or write down what you heard.

Otherwise, the Taste Altar runs the risk of becoming another Pinterest board or folder containing three thousand things you liked for ten seconds and never looked at again.

The physical limit matters too. A finite object asks you to choose, arrange, remove, compare, and return. Your hands become involved in giving the attraction a place.

I am using a small A5 ring binder because I want to move pages around, add pockets, take something out, and curate it as my understanding changes. A bound journal can make me weirdly self-conscious. If I make a page I dislike, I either have to live with it or tear it out, and both options can become far more emotionally significant than a piece of paper deserves to be. The binder gets me out of my own nonsense.

You may want a sketchbook you can ruin, an accordion folder, a recipe box, a handmade book, or something made from cloth. The right form is the one that can physically hold the evidence your attention brings home.

A printed image can go into it. So can a color combination, the shape of a shadow, a photograph you took on the way to the pharmacy, a note about the rhythm of a sentence, a pressed thing, a dream image that remained after breakfast, a tiny material test, or a fragment of your old work that still interests you even though the rest of the piece failed.

The practice can take place in as little as fifteen minutes (sometimes less) because these encounters are already happening in micro-moments throughout your day.

The question is whether you stop long enough to catch hold of and record it so you can revisit it again later.

Most of us do not lack things worth noticing. We lack practice remaining with them. Attention behaves like a muscle: it strengthens through use. Each time you record something, move it beside something else, and look again, you practice staying after the first spark instead of saving, scrolling, and forgetting.

Give yourself a few brief returns each week. Fifteen minutes is enough to add something, compare two pages, or write down what you noticed. You are making the collection familiar enough to recognize when something new belongs beside what is already there.

Over time, you may realize that several images contain the same verdant green, that you keep choosing crowded compositions with one empty corner, or that almost everything you have gathered feels worn, fogged, overgrown, or partly hidden.

The pattern becomes visible because the evidence is together and because you have looked at it more than once. Every entry says: This was worthy of recording. Every return helps you discover whether the attraction survives attention and what it has in common with the other things you love.

And it is a hell of a lot easier to give an hour to painting once you have some idea what you actually want to paint. Once you know what you are trying to bring into form, you can choose the technique because it serves the vision instead of hoping another class or book or skill will provide one.

Protected beholding is a practice of presence

In our Discord community, when another maker shows you something she loves, she is placing a piece of her interior world in front of you.

It may be unfinished or difficult to explain. It may look small from the outside: two images she cannot stop placing beside one another, a piece of damaged silk, three lines of a poem, a charcoal experiment that failed but exposed something she wants to keep.

We will practice something I call protected beholding.

We slow down long enough to recognize what the maker has actually brought. We can ask questions, reflect what we see, or notice a connection with something she showed us before.

We do not rush into critique. We do not interpret her psychology, announce what her style is, or tell her which thread she should follow. The thread of interpretation and meaning belongs to her.

We know what it feels like to share something meaningful and receive a heart icon, a quick compliment, advice we did not ask for, or silence while the stream moves on. When someone is showing us a piece of her heart, the least we can do is actually be there. And when the room offers that presence back to us, it becomes easier to share work that is still tender, strange, not yet fully explained, or in the middle of becoming.

We do not have to give compliments that we do not mean, nor do we need to pass judgement. The attention itself is the gift. This is one of the ways we will practice charis: the grace, pleasure, and generosity that move between people and call forth a response.

The studio workbook: a further invitation

The downloadable studio workbook will be added to your Stan membership area on November 21, at the end of our time together in Discord. It offers additional concepts, exercises, and contemplative prompts for continuing with what you have discovered.

It is supplementary. While we are together, the Taste Altar is the most important place to put your time and energy. I want us to get familiar with doing the practice and learn from what happens when we return to it. The workbook gives you somewhere further to go once you have that experience to draw on.

The questions keep you close to what you have gathered. What changes when you put these images beside each other? Which part do you keep returning to? Does the same quality appear somewhere else, in a different material or form?

You can write a few sentences, arrange a page, make a small study, and look again.

The workbook also introduces four practices for beginning to make from what you discover:

• Making the vision bearable: Find one small piece of a larger desire that your present time, body, materials, and skill can approach. Practice deciding what belongs in this attempt and what can wait.
• Temporary devotion: Choose one strand to follow through a small experiment. Give it enough time to learn something from the encounter, without requiring the choice to settle your whole creative future.
• The material answer: Bring a quality you love into contact with a material. Notice what happens through making: what the material offers, what changes, and what you want to try again.
• Charis: Continue exploring the attentive, generous responses we practice together, and carry them into your other creative relationships.

These are invitations you can revisit as your collection grows. A prompt may become more interesting after you have spent another fortnight noticing.

Giving Venus a place in your creative life

One of the ways we grow in Venusian virtue is by doing Venusian things: attending to beauty and spending time with what we love.

A separate downloadable Venusian Devotion guide will be available in your Stan membership area by October 5, alongside the Taste Altar practice guide and workshop recording. It includes a simplified practice for Venus/Aphrodite on her planetary day and night: a small ritual with which to enter the Taste Altar practice and mark this time as part of the sacredness of your life.

The devotion continues as you open the collection. You spend time with an image. You notice something you had passed over. You make room for the pleasure of looking again.

What begins to become visible

When the things you love are scattered across your life, it can be difficult to recognize what they have in common.

Gathering them gives you somewhere to look.

Over time, you may notice the same quality appearing in a painting, a piece of music, and a photograph you took without knowing why. You may find words for an atmosphere you have been pursuing for years. You may discover that the part you love in someone else’s work is small enough to explore with materials you already own.

This is what I want Spinning Gold to help you begin: a Taste Altar you know how to tend, and a growing familiarity with the desires it holds.

As those desires become more recognizable, they can help you choose what to explore next. You have somewhere to return when your interests feel scattered again.

Who is holding the room?

Meet Amaya

I’m Amaya Rourke, a painter, writer, and longtime teacher living on the Dingle Peninsula, at the wind-blown western edge of Ireland. My work begins in the studio: with storm light, sea weather, chronic illness, material limitation, and the daily practice of making something by hand.

Spinning Gold grows from my own long return to painting and the practice I had to build from the body, materials, limits, and life I actually have. I will not tell you what your art should become. I will help you pay closer attention to the desire already trying to lead you there.

Give what you love somewhere to gather.