Hey friends! Figured I’d write up some thoughts I’m having on Twitter, and share some art I’ve done in the last little bit.
Here’s a tree I sketched out for my dad’s birthday recently, with some indigo paints a friend gifted me and some muddy-green ink I picked up that I really like.
Here’s some thoughts I posted to Twitter today, that I think are a nice bit of insight to keep me going:
I can’t remember who posted it, but I saw something like “artists need plenty of time to do nothing”, and honestly? For real. Making stuff, at least for me, requires a massive amount of focus and energy to channel things onto paper. That, on top of more typical life shit lol.
So with that in mind I feel better about not hammering stuff out like in an assembly line. And even if I was? Still would need proper rest time.
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A healthy boundary I’m developing in regard to my ambitions, is “what I do and can do is good enough.” I see all this cool shit people make that I love the look of, and instead of having high expectations I just let myself make what I make and do a loose study if I’m so inclined.
I’m hitting a point where I’m fairly content with my level of skill and craft. I am playing around and figuring out what I wanna say, beyond making neat little vignettes to soothe my soul with. Biggest things seem to be “ha isn’t life fucking absurd” and “just gotta keep going.”
I think these speak for themselves, for the most part, but I’ll elaborate a bit just for my own sake, to get some more thoughts out.
A big thing I ran into for ages was having lofty ideals and ambitions, with no clear idea how to get there and limited energy just to brute force it. Even despite that, I’m proud of a lot of what I’ve done and the personal growth I’ve had.
My goal moving forward is self-fulfillment and sustainability. And remembering to live. Art isn’t just putting marks on a page. Music isn’t just hammering out some notes. A big part of it is in studying from life and studying craft — this includes not just learning to do the thing, but learning to say what I want with the thing.
Much of this is related to like, finding the light in the darkness. The world is a deeply chaotic, often unpleasant, but also beautiful place. Giving contrast to and bringing awareness to parts of it can really be enlightening and also sometimes encouraging, despite the deeply dark parts of reality.
Existence, this planet, the things we’ve got, us… it’s all an extremely unlikely thing in this infinite universe we live in. And there’s a lot to do if we’re going to keep existing, but that’s not the focus of this post.
I guess my point is, keep going, keep doing the thing, appreciate it ’til we can’t. I dunno, this post got more existential than I anticipated. I hope y’all got something out of this post, too!