It’s that time of year again, reader. Time to look back and look forward while the year winds down. Time to have a tiny little existential crisis and set a bunch of intentions and then just hold on for dear life when nothing goes as planned.
I felt really stuck and overwhelmed all last year, but suddenly I look around and I realize I’ve managed to wrest a new reality out of the old one, and I think I’ll be much happier here. Maybe change is always painful, even when it’s good. Does everyone else already know that?
Yesterday the temperature rose above freezing for the first time in weeks, and the cat and I spent some time outside, investigating the rows of icicles forming along the new gutters, and the deepening tracks of the rabbit road. The snow was melting in soft, wet heaps, and the cat made nose prints and paw prints while the sun shone out of a clear, blue sky.
We had company last week and through the weekend, which ratcheted both the cozy festivities and my usual holiday stress to new heights. I miss having that full house, but I think we’re all glad that things are back to normal.
Laundry day. I’ve got towels and sheets and clothes of various temperature requirements lined up in little heaps. The laundry room is right next to the furnace workshop, through a pair of slatted saloon doors, so it’s the chore of choice when I can’t tear myself away from whatever I’m working on. Something is getting done. Not much else, but something.
I’ve been continuing today in sorting through old paintings, and doing some writing in a pretty new A5 binder I started last week. It’s faux camel suede, with nice KOKUYO loose leaf paper inside, the same setup I’m using for my languishing novel.
The blog needed its own space for notes and ideas and little chunks of prose. And of course I’m indexing it because I’m a freak for organization. Does anyone else write every other page in their binders upside down or is that just me? If you know you know.
Or maybe it really is just me, because so far it’s not really working out.
Come along now while I put some paint to paper, and have a few cups of tea in the furnace workshop. But first stare into that radioactive sky a while. Doesn’t that cloud look like Alaska?
I pulled out a few older paintings while organizing the workshop today and thought this one deserved another look. Yes, I know it’s not Thursday, July 24th.
So go ahead and have a look while I get my thoughts together.
I wrote yesterday about making turkey stock and getting into a new blank MIDORI notebook. Today has turned out much the same. I think I’ll end up with some seven quarts of stock, all told. Not too shabby! Completed artwork and some discussion of bike life after the cut, please stick around:
Wouldn’t you say Thanksgiving Two is better than Thanksgiving One? I still spend all day in the kitchen, but mostly just making lovely stock and reading soup recipes and daydreaming.
This week my entire housekeeping list has been supplanted by Thanksgiving tasks. Procure roasting pan. Bike to grocery store. And just in the nick of time, too, the snow came the next night. There was also a sock related side quest which expanded to include mall bao and a quick check of all the Barnes & Noble promo tables. Just the essentials.
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.
adventures 