Back when I was trying to tell myself how little art really meant to me, I used to doodle people and animals as part of the landscape. living in the mountains, surrounded by nature, It’s almost impossible not to hear voices from the forest and imagine the spirits of people who are here before close by.
When I look back at those drawings now, however, I see something melancholy about them.
Last night, I was more than melancholy. I’ve gone to bed early thinking I’d get a full eight hours of sleep and ended up tossing and turning until almost midnight. I had me the classic mistake of looking at social media before going to bed, and I could not force myself to sleep against a backdrop of dread.
So I got up. I went to my studio.
I didn’t have any pictures I wanted to paint from, and I’d spent the entire day inside doing tech-support. For some reason I squeezed out a bit of yellow ocher onto the pallet. that I added white and orange and cadmium yellow. And I started to paint.
One of my old trees started to form against a sunshine filled sky, and I recognized or mild pieces. this time, however, there was no melancholy. There’s no ambivalence in my life about claiming my creativity. And that creativity, last night, had nothing to do with working as an artist, it had to do with art pushing away bread.
It had to do with blowing sunshine. And sometimes you just have to blow sunshine up your own skirt no matter how silly it seems.