Saturday 27 September 2014

Four-Letter Words

Watercolour Workshop #1

Somewhat belatedly, I'm writing about returning to serious creative work, as well as my six-month mental-health update. I've been thinking a lot about both since the last blog entry, and doing a great deal more, in a structured, formal sense, about the former.

That process has pushed some of the public commentary (although not my journal-writing) with a bit more thoughtful retrospection about both of them aside.

Watercolour Workshop #2

There are a lot of four-letter words I could use to describe my life in the last 3.5 years, but until recently, one of them would not have been care.

Most of the time, I didn't, and on the rare occasions when I did (involving, more often than not, walking away from people who did not treat me with "care" either), I would surprise myself by doing so, as the reaction was much more of a subconscious one than a conscious one.

Here's Merriam-Webster's definition of care: I've had a lot of 1 and 2, and some 5, but not much else.

Watercolour Workshop #3

Well, that's the big change: I now consciously care: it shows at work, and more importantly, it's showing up in the art I'm now pumping out(comparatively speaking: three titled pieces with "2014" after their titles is huge, for me).

Part of finding my way back to art, as I mentioned here, was by putting myself "out there" to do art again, beginning with a watercolour class through the Esker Foundation with artist Brenda Draney last November. I wasn't ready then to share what I produced that day because I wasn't sure where the work came from.

I'm still not, but I've been producing enough new things that seem to be drawing on common themes, that perhaps it's time to begin to expose them to the light of day.

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