I haven't forgotten about you here. Just took a little break, trying to figure things out.
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Thing I have not ever known: Pittsburghers measure distance in time. Example:
Person 1: How far is it to Morgantown? Person 2: Oh, an hour, and hour fifteen. Apparently the rest of the world measures distance in miles. This knowledge makes so many odd looks make sense. 
I don't pretend that I'm an "artist" of any kind. I just like to play with paint. A good friend of mine took this picture in Seattle this spring, and since it has more detail than things I usually paint I mixed some paints and used up an extra canvas I had laying around. I don't love it, but I'm proud of myself for giving it a try instead of just laying around thinking about it. Anyway, here's the end result: 
 Once upon a time, I was terrible at mornings. I'm still not good at mornings, but after almost a year of waking up between 3 and 4AM to go to the gym, I have learned to appreciate 6AM.
This morning, after days of rain, the sky decided to come out. Sitting in my office, waiting for my computer to boot up, I thought to myself... 6AM is a special time. There's a saying that a person has no greater critic of himself than himself. I'm not sure that's true of everyone, but I am pretty certain that it's true for me. I do a lot of self-reflection, evaluation, and adjusting. I guess it's a form of perfectionism. It tends to be a cyclical thing... I have a period of good times working toward a goal, I hit the goal, I enjoy a period of time after hitting the goal, then I flounder around without direction or another goal to work toward until I'm in a bleak funk, I isolate myself from everyone for a while, and regroup to start all over again.
Each turn of the cycle, a different theme sticks out as the most important to remember. I like to think that I learn from each cycle and that my life is a series of progressive steps forward. I got to thinking about it though, and realized I'm incredibly fortunate when it comes to "winging it" but I don't necessarily move forward more than through. Today, to clear out some of my headspace, I feel like writing down where I am today, stuff I have learned lately from watching other people in my orbit, the values that are important to me as I work up from a bottoming out on my current cycle. This stuff isn't in any order, isn't intended to help anyone, and probably seems random. Since that's what the inside of my head usually looks like, that shouldn't be surprising haha. Really, it's an evolving list of stuff I think about most days. I always hope to grow. 1. Beware condescension. Having knowledge or experience isn't a license to be a dick, especially when I don't necessarily have the facts to make a judgment anyway.. 2. Experience a rut long enough to know it's not a place I want to be again, but don't stay in the rut long enough to call it home! It's easy to take good time for granted... it's just as easy to miss the lesson in a bad time through the misery. 3. "Life is too short to be little." Remember remember remember! No one can get wasted todays back. STOP WASTING THEM! 4. "Not your area". A friend said this to me once, and it has been one of my favorite quotes since. If it doesn't directly affect me or my choices, it's not my problem to worry about. So why worry? 5. Love. At the very least, have compassion. Allowing miserable, selfish people to make me miserable and selfish isn't beneficial to anyone. But seriously, love. And allow myself to be loved. Maybe that's the harder part. 6. None of the good things in my life have come from sitting and waiting for good things to happen. Or whining about why things aren't happening. The good things in my life happened because I decided I wanted them and then did something about it. 6a. My next lesson in life is figuring out how to make life work when it isn't just me that decisions rely upon. I guess that's growing up.  I had a birthday last week. I took a week off work and went to visit family. Mom made me a cake. Okay, to be fair I nagged until she agreed to make the cake. I can be a real pain in the ass when I try. At any rate, she made me cake and it was delicious.
I've been living on the west coast for three years now. That's a solid 2500 miles from my family, many of my friends, and the culture I was raised in. It's funny the things you take for granted when you're in the only place you know. It's funny how those are the things you notice most when they're not there anymore. A lot of little ordinary somethings really stood out to me in that week at home, and in my mind I had sketched out how I'd share some of those things that touched me the most. I realized as I started to do just that, that the ordinary somethings that I've come to appreciate as the things that make my heart beat aren't really so exceptional when I try to put them to words. Instead, all I can really think to go with is a few words of encouragement taken from truths I have been reminded of recently: take some time today to love, to grow, to learn, and to notice the things you've let slip past you as days rush by. It's easy to wish todays away to get to some vague tomorrow, but worth so much more to slow down and appreciate time before it's gone. Oh yeah, and have some cake. CAKE!  I posted this picture to day 12 over on The Challenge. I think it is one of my favorite pictures that I have ever taken. It makes me think that heaven exists. I decided a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to learn to play with oil paints, and while I have another project in mind for a larger canvas, for my first try I wanted to do something on a small canvas that would be easily disposable if it went horrifically wrong. I thought I would try to replicate my favorite picture... nothing like setting a stupidly high standard for a first attempt. First lesson learned: oil paints take a LONG TIME to dry. I had to wait a full week between layers so, to be honest, I lost the momentum I had on the first day for the day I completed the painting. Patience and focus are not strong suits for me. Second lesson learned: I picked up way more watching episodes of Bob Ross and his painting of happy little trees when I was a kid than I realized. I don't know if I have the patience to do a lot of oil painting in the future, but with practice I think I can use it in a way that isn't terrible. That said, here's the final product... I don't think it captured the same feeling as the photograph, and I apologize for the glare, but as a first attempt at oil painting I'm pretty happy with the sky portion and think it will be worth trying a new project or two in the future.   When I compare myself to people who I hold in high esteem as creative people, I find I do not compare. It's not a "feel sorry for myself" thing, or a "fishing for compliments" thing... everyone is good at something, and when I compare myself to people who are good at creative endeavors, I find that creativity is just not my strong suit. I'm okay with that, I have other talents.
Today as I was throwing together the cake pictured in this post, it occurred to me that maybe I was thinking about creativity the wrong way. Creativity isn't like mathematics or science, things that are known, established, and easy to quantify. The purpose of creativity is to constantly challenge measurable objectives, not be measured by them. It's not fair to minimize the things that I try to do by validating my efforts on a scale that doesn't apply to what I'm measuring. So here it is. I am creative. I am successfully creative. Whether it's baking a cake, painting a picture, or taking a photograph, my creativity is strong because I try. How that is perceived beyond my efforts is up to you, not me.  I saw a painting on etsy.com recently that I immediately fell in love with. I had actually planned on buying it if it was still available after my month of travel is over, and then a friend offered to try to paint it for me. For some reason, yesterday I decided to go to the craft store for a huge canvas to combat this ever-present beige wall problem, only to find that canvas was 40% off for all sizes! It was a deal I couldn't pass up and, although I did get a big single canvas and I didn't get pieces of canvas as large as the original painting (big canvas is pricey, sale or not), I did get something I could work with for my own interpretation of the "Mystic Tree".
Since I was working with 12x24 canvas instead of 12x36, my dimensions were a little bit different than in the original. I ultimately decided to do three pieces instead of four as a result. I went back and forth about background colors - it didn't seem to feel right if any of the four colors used in the original were taken out - but I finally settled on red, orange and green. Each canvas is started with a layer of yellow to add some unison to the whole picture. It took longer than I had expected - painting requires more attention to detail than pastels, which is probably why I generally prefer pastels to acrylics - but I am so, so happy with the result. Once I get the pieces sealed, they're going up on the large [and still very beige] living room wall where I hung the pastel from the previous post (it seemed big while I was working on it, but is truly dwarfed by the size of the wall), and the pastel can be reallocated somewhere else in the house. In "looking forward" news... in coming weeks I have trips to two very different parts of the country - El Paso, TX and Juneau, AK/Whistler, BC. Coincidentally the photo project ("The Challenge") will be kicking off as well, so expect to see awesome things. I do!  Back to the beige wall problem. A recurring problem for me is that every painting or drawing I do turns out darker than I intend. It doesn't help that the content I choose for my paintings is inherently dark. At any rate, when you're surrounded by dark images, brightness is tough to come by.
I love the colors of the sky at sunset. What better way to brighten a room than to add shades of yellow, orange, red and violet? As is usual at this point, the picture turned out darker than I intended - I need to learn more about creating water - but I'm really happy with the brightness of the sky. Once again I have fallen back on oil pastels as my medium, which resulted in a stained carpeting (time to invest in tarps!) a cracked finger (from using it to blend the colors on the canvas), and a really awesome fuzzy blended effect. I can't wait to hang this in my living room! |
About Annette
I'm pretty ordinary (aside from the fact that I'm a super groovy kind of chick). I really believe it's essential to appreciate the awesomeness of things around us. I believe equally that beauty and joy are being sold short if they're not shared. Archives
October 2013
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