Someone told me recently that I should be working on my art for me, not to seek recognition. Huh. Does it mean something bad about me that I see no reason to make art that I don’t intend to share? To seek recognition implies, I think, a desire for accolades. I do seek recognition, but literally just that — to be recognized. I see no reason to tell this story to myself, as I already know it. I want to tell it to you.
This year, a data loss left me with only a handful (here below, one of that handful) of the images of planets I’ve collected playing No Man’s Sky. Hundreds of beautiful coincidences of color and form and light. Crushing, though I do feel a little bit silly, being so crushed.
But they weren’t just random screenshots, they were an extension of my photography, something I poured a lot of creative energy into, and more, they were the references I paint from, so they represent this huge lost potential — now they’re all paintings that will never exist.
If you tuned in last time you already know that I’ve been making some upgrades to my travel paint kit after discovering Art Toolkit, which has apparently been there all along while I did years of fruitless searching. I was really excited to finally find something that could fit my full range of tube paints and take up almost no room in my bag.
After I filled the pans and let them dry down overnight I found that a few colors needed another layer, so today I thought I’d boot up No Man’s Sky and do some painting while I finish my new palette.
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I’m down in the furnace workshop again, forming a fragile alliance with this tall wooden barstool, through something I’m thinking of as yoga as I’m doing it, but now that I’m writing about it I realize is just stretching. I think the key is never to sit on it. I’ve just gone from a physically demanding job to a more officey job, helping fill orders for a small business, and instead of my body hurting less it just hurts the same amount but in new ways. And so, my workshop’s standing-height bench with round wood stool, already torturous to sit on for any amount of time, has become untenable. These are things I can’t possibly have thought about this much when I was younger.
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I recently ran across this advice while doing hundreds of hours of research before adopting a cat: start as you intend to go on. And by recently, I mean over a year ago, around the time I decided to start this blog. The purveyor of said advice, whose identity I have unfortunately forgotten, stumbled upon it herself in a parenting book, but felt it had a broader relevance, and I quite agree. Because while I don’t remember where exactly I heard it, here I sit, one year later thinking yeah! That is how I should start this blog!
Exactly as I . . . intend to go on.
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adventures 