Studio Scraps: Measuring Cargo Space for Canvases

Sometimes you just need to lay around with the dog and listen to Ludovico Einaudi. My mid-week brain dump.

I know nothing about anything, except where I’ve been.
If you aren’t paying me, the risk is all yours.

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I’m slowly letting go of the need to explain myself to everyone. It isn’t resolved completely. But when I sit at home alone, my thoughts quiet to a hum and lose all motivation to share the entirety of what has happened to me.

So many things have evolved and changed for me in days, weeks, months, a singular year. Sometimes I feel like a phoenix rising up day after day after day.

There are times I output a great deal, creatively, as a result. But I’ve been perceptibly drained for a few weeks now. My visual art is doing just fine, that emptiness almost seems a benefit.

Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Millie Pee — 33” x 66” mixed media by me. Finished this week.

But writing… woe is me. When my tank is empty I become convinced I’ll never write another word for eternity. My ultimate goal, write prolifically.

I converted my front porch into a lounge today. Laid around with Millie (🐶), watched videos about art composition, listened to Ludovico Einaudi’s Tiny Desk Concert. Stretched and strained and watched a few planes cross the sky.

When I decided to come back to life, I had a few words to put down. Using a prompt from Roger Robinson — write a poem titled:

You Were Right

You were right to believe I would leave you.
I’ve been secretly leaving everything I ever loved since I was old enough to.
That’s why you picked me though.
Because being left is all you’ve ever known.
And even when it’s awful, we always defer than face the unknown.

Horseflies on the wall.
Rubbing their hands clean of it all.

You were right about me.
Leaving you when things became impossible.
When you pressed hard intending to see me fall.

You were right about me.
That I would be just like everybody else.
Abandon you.

You were right about me.
When you proclaimed, “You love me so much!”
I guess we’ll grow old together from a safe distance.

You were right about me.
Just you wait and see.

The place I’d mounted my security camera kept getting in the way of the umbrella I use to shade me in the mornings. So it was time to move it to the other side. Satisfied, I moved on to washing the dishes, making tea, getting ready for bed.

More Ludovico to keep me company, and some words floating through my head more freely.

I planted hundreds of seeds in my garden.
Most of them didn’t grow.
But a few did.

My passiflora vines are growing like mad now. I managed not to kill a few who sat neglected in pots through the winter months. They’ve shed their dry leaves and beautiful green glossy ones have replaced them. I have melons throwing out creepy crawlies, and tomatoes you can smell growing a block away.

I like burning my candles in three’s.
Witches, hobgoblins, and bees.

Making progress on this piece, added more color this week. 9” x 12”.

There’s always been an appeal for me to the evening air that comes in. It’s so different from the morning air. To me it feels more hopeful, less pressurized. It’s not arriving in anticipation of how productive you will be, but to embrace you for being present at all.

My electric car gives me anxiety.
It is always running down the clock.
Always consuming energy.
If I’m not using it, it is still being used up.
Cooling and calculating and keeping track.
A subscription model with dark patterns
has us convinced we’re the ones driving…

I bought a new car today. A new, used, car today. It’s just a car, you’d say. But everything is metaphor in this life this way. It’ll be the first red car I’ve owned. I had developed a habit of owning white or beige cars. Three white cars (including the ambulance), two beige. I owned this same car once before, it was my favorite! Back then, it was blue, now it’s red. Red, white, and blue. Or rather white-white-beige-blue-white-beige-red.

When I bought the blue one I was measuring the cargo space to make sure I could sleep comfortably in it for an extended period of time. This time, I measured the cargo space to make sure my art canvases would fit just fine.

Yes Daddy, No More Spilled Milk — as a print, blown up to poster size arrived this week. Original is only 4” x 6”, testing how she looks propped up in the bath house. 🥰

Your life will change if you decide to.

I just want to be happy!
Except you don’t, not really.
Happiness is easy.
You’re waking up every day choosing
the hard settings.

What a cruel thing to say!
That’s when you know it contains
truths you don’t want to see.

I’ll start chelating again tomorrow, continuing my journey to remove heavy metals. Every 2.5 hours for 72 hours, I’ll take a micro-dose of Alpha-Lipoic Acid and DMSA. I have a decade ahead of me of this, probably. You learn patience in a round-about way. The happiness really is easy; choosing to leave behind bullshit is the hard(er) thing.

Rest, rest rest.
How can you create from an empty tank?

Try not to take yourself too seriously. Random ink on cheap watercolor paper while attending a zoom meeting on Monday.

I’m turning off my hard settings today. What’s one hard setting you need to switch off this week?

Tell me in the comments. I’ll be reading them between alarms.

Sweet dreams, and happy Wednesday.