Today is, suddenly, very busy.
Maybe I should start with yesterday; we got married. It was just the two of us signing some papers with the judge approving it; it's the most one can do here if we refuse religious marriage. When I divorced, in 2018, it felt like my life had ended; my Blender community kept me afloat during the four years I needed to heal. And now I'm glad my life didn't end then; the best two years of my entire 49 years of life, have been these last two - with my second-love-of-my-life, and without the daily toxicity of my dad. One death, one love, one wedding, and my life was... whole, hale and fixed. It's... if I believed in higher powers I'd call it a miracle.
I got 10$ fake-gold rings on Aliexpress, had no ceremony nor public celebration. It was quiet, private and great.
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Then my brother (63) got hospitalized again; it's been a month now since a minor sinusitis surgery that got an unfortunate and dangerous complication, on top of which there's an infection. Bro's been in and out of the hospital for one to two weeks each time. There's not much to do apart from doing what he wants (which is not to come visit) and waiting. So we do. I send him silly memes twice a day.
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Then my new husband took me to an art shop and told me to binge whatever, as a late birthday present, and I did, and now I have many exciting new toys like more granulating watercolor, and excellent colored pencils, some low-grade paper and silly acrylic inks I can drip into water and watch the paint spread, which is so therapeutic I plan to give it all to my brother when he's released from the hospital so he can play with it and maybe relax. So I hopped to see him today, but only for ten minutes because he hates visitors. It's the first I see him since this started, and... well, not much to say, just wait.
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We went to have breakfast in some nice place with the kids this morning, to so-called celebrate the wedding (but actually just to spend nice time with the kids). It was sweet and quiet and celebratory. Then that brief visit to my brother, and...
Then Noogie wrote to me that her father died this morning. She lives abroad, but her parents live - lived - in the same city as I do. She's flying back to this country today, so she might crash at ours for a few; as said - a busy day.
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So I'm sitting quietly in my room and drawing with my new pencils and trying to let the emotions flow through, do what they need. I'm not upset, as none of the bad things are mine, and the good things were done in small enough a scale to be nice and not a big emotional thing (one of the reasons we chose not to tell people, not even close friends); but I think that one more stimulation and I might feel it all, so thank heavens for drawing.
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Flower painting is boring for me, both to see or to paint, but the challenge of figuring out the shapes and being able to draw them from any angle, that's... well, I don't enjoy it, per ce, but I feel I need to do it to practice fundamental drawing skills so I can paint whatever I do want to paint, if I ever find what that is. So the practice sketchbook is full of analyzing notes and failed leaves:
And a practice page for the anemone's cauline leaves, whose shape I find tricky to comprehend for some reason:
And the inevitable experiment spread - this time it's rock salt on various watercolor consistencies:
There's something liberating and fun at being a watercolor noob that doesn't have to prove anything. I feel free to suck at it, which makes it far more fun than painting something I care about, or that needs to serve a purple, like the numerous tabletop roleplaying campaign art I painted from age 14 until Blender consumed me at age 38.
Blender at with Warcraft was incredible fun too; an entirely different challenge, that got my brain feeling like it was exercising every day. It was amazing, because at points it was so hard and when I managed to figure it out on my own it was a dopamine explosion which, I believe, was one of the reasons I never wanted to stop with it - and neither do most other people who get into it.
But in 2023 that medical thing happened it kept me preoccupied for two years, and I neglected my community, and couldn't play Warcraft, and... and somehow, when the new love came and the bad stuff left and I healed, somehow using my hands to craft physical thing had a whole new allure. It's not only the need to create something beautiful (which is the main drive, rendering the content of said beauty almost irrelevant) - it's that there's a joy of the senses, the physical feeling of a brush on paper, the pigment spreading in water... a physical sensation experience, that's what it is. And Blender doesn't have that.
And Blender was addictive, consuming, stimulating and great to take my mind off things; but painting with brush and pencil has a... it feels like the opposite of stimulation. There is no mental engagement or friction; it's... zen.
Which is why I'm sitting here, drawing boring flowers (as said, what I paint hardly matters, it's the action that does), and letting the quiet wash over me, and my body soak the pretty colors of the pencils, the sunlight streaming through the window, and the idiot cripple cat's whining outside my door.
Is there any better way to end a post, regardless of the fact that this is mostly an art blog? Surely not.
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