All a swirl...
Noting the days and tying knots in the tapestry of life.
It’s nearly the end of a January that has seemed deeper and darker than many a year prior, and it feels like it has stretched an epoch, too. We have mostly recovered from the flu. For some reason, it took me far longer to heal from it than the rest of my family, and it’s only been within the last week or so that I’ve actually felt somewhat human and whole again. I’ve struggled to find my footing since. Every thing feels at loose ends, scattered, and bedraggled. I want to find and tie all the knots back together, but so far I’ve been just well enough to keep to the very basics of things.
Emotionally, I think we are feeling the weight of the darkness in the world and in the United States especially. All eyes are watching Minnesota. I am frightened. My kids are frightened. It’s hard to maintain equilibrium as a mother, as a creator, an artist in the face of such rapidly shifting sands. It feels bizarre to hear the news while you are simultaneously caring for the ones you love- making a meal, washing clothes, jotting down some notes. It feels so small in the face of so much anger and loss. It’s hard to hold.
I’m often reminded though of words from the Hobbit movie: “Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”
While Tolkien didn’t write that one (it’s from the screenplay)- there’s another quote of his that I have written on a door in our house that my entire family sees everyday:
“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
I’ve never taken that as a permission to bypass or ignore what is happening around me. That’s never what Gandalf is saying- note the line ‘but to do what is in us for the succor of those wherein we are set’ - to do what is in us. That looks different for each person. There’s no way we can address the whole big thing (‘master all the tides of the world’) but we can do what is right- right in front of us, where our feet are set.
That’s definitely something I can tie to.
I haven’t had a whole lot of time to do much of anything creative over the last two months, and the muse hasn’t been exceptionally kind, either. Sometimes you just need to start- get out of your own head. In this case, constraint ended up being the way into creating, of all things. Not something I would have thought of before, but it worked! It came about like this- in a mad dash out of the house on yet another long drive to take a child to an activity, I grabbed the two things I could see and find in the five seconds I had. It happened to be a Christmas gift (a pack of Prismacolor pencils) and an old, old notebook I had.
I can’t even tell you where I bought this notebook from- it’s that old. At least 2011, maybe earlier. The pencils are not the typical brand I like to use- and they aren’t water soluble, a lot more waxy and solid than my normal pick. But they were kindly given and pretty colors, so who can beat that? I’ll try them.
I’ve really wanted to study character work and emotion. Something about the little boxes in the notebook gave me permission to just work on one little box at a time. Both the paper and pencil quality means that I can’t be too precious or precise about it. That, too, seemed to release some of the perfectionism I tend towards, and made sure that emotion and what the character might be thinking came through more than a perfect render in pencil or color (especially limited to the palette of the pencil box, which wouldn’t necessarily be my ‘normal’ choices).
So far I’ve filled in two whole page spreads this month, usually in five to ten minute increments while sitting in the car (and usually with the natural light rapidly fading, which has also been an interesting constraint). Some of these are direct studies from artists I’ve saved in my Pinterest. There’s too many to link here for proper credit, but please visit that board to see the credit and inspiration. Some of them were just literally from my head, and a few I believe were directly inspired by one of my favorite artists, Abigail Halpin. I tend to reference her work when I’m working on character and emotion, because I really enjoy how she mixes her style with the characters emotionality, and I always seem to learn something new when I am studying her work. (Another favorite is Freya Blackwood.)
These were probably two of my favorites:
The second was a study of a much bigger piece by Abigail Halpin. I was so tickled by the look on the girl’s face- her annoyance- that I wanted to try to see if I could capture that idea myself. I smile a bit every time I see it. You can just see this girl ready to hop out of the page ready to tell you what’s what. I also love the little boy hanging on the fence in the first two page layout, but my camera would not focus on him correctly every time I tried, so I don’t have a closer picture of it.
It has been a good exercise to be so constrained. I also made a point to make sure that I wasn’t just doing close up of faces, but also full body, scenes, more than one character in a scene, and profiles. I still really struggle with profiles, but I’m pretty pleased with the ones that came out here, more so than some other work where I’ve tried a lot harder and a lot longer to accomplish them. That fascinates me! There’s also a fair bit of a mix between a more realistic rendering and a more stylized (cartoon like) rendering, and I’m learning a lot with both approaches.
I can also see the change in expressions and emotion from the first two page spread to the second two page spread…I think you can tell which layout is from the second half of the month and which is from the first.
I don’t know where February will take us. We have some big medical procedures coming up at the beginning of the month for a few family members, and the results from those will determine next steps. Rare disease is weird like that. One of my rare disease kiddos was supposed to have a fairly intensive surgery on his chest this month because of a condition called pectus carinatum. He has been a brace for quite a while. However, due to his other rare GI disease and perhaps his seizures, he’s just not healthy enough to do the surgery- he’s too immunocompromised in a few different areas for them to feel comfortable doing a surgery that requires such an intense recovery. We will have to see what can be done to improve things and then revisit having the surgery- while meanwhile hoping that the bracing in the meantime will somehow improve the situation to the point that he won’t require the surgery. It seems like we never know from week to week which way we will be facing. It gets hard to make plans that way.
I hope to keep drawing and painting as I can. I have so much writing I want to do, so many thoughts swirling- both in the essay/prose arena and fiction that is slowly starting to form in my brain. I have no idea how any of that will happen, but I guess I shall have to keep in mind that constraining myself might help me accomplish those goals. Here’s praying.
How are you, dear hearts? What is helping you to focus these days? Did you have a favorite from those spreads? I’d love to hear.
I love the two old woman talking together and the girl with windswept hair and all the little boxes working together and using up journals that have been hanging around...and *you*