Fortuna

A Find Momentum update: People and Trees has been updated. It feels a bit refreshed.

Drawn on Wednesday, May 21, 2014.

I walk my dog. I go to work. I eat peach parfaits. Art happens on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons at the Valley Center for the Arts. Video games and board games happen twice a week too. Spouse has work pouring in, sits at a desk by the window. Debts are steadily dissolving. Long ventures down the Rec Path. Listening to Welcome to Night Vale. A strangely settled, calm, and fortunate life as of late.

Attending a 5-day cartooning studio at the Center for Cartoon Studies this August. Will hop a train and head to Vermont for instruction, camaraderie, and 24-hour access to the CCS studio space and production lab. I imagine it’ll help me get out of my head, I hope, even as I take it with me.

Something

I felt like I needed to post something today, whether or not it was good, smart, clear, or true. These photos aren’t great, but here’s a short, three-page comic I’ve been working on.

 

Bright Beet

On Monday, I started a full-time job with outstanding benefits; I sold two paintings at Delicious! the Valley Arts Council‘s exhibit on Thursday, the pumpkin below and the beet above; and I have an article to work on for a magazine I admire. My spouse has begun writing about TV again, and has some solid job leads in his field. I have red low tops to wear while walking outside, but left my heels to stay in the office.

In job searching, nothing works until it does. Advice is usually much more condescending than helpful, I’ve found, even as I offer advice to others searching. We are smug, the employed. We are so much closer to those who aren’t, or aren’t to their desired amount, than we realize. Please let me remember this when I forget it.

Form and Content

Grant Snider’s Incidental Comics: inspiration from both ends.

 

Fake It Til You Become It

I found this TEDTalks: Life Hack episode powerful. Maybe striking a Wonder Woman pose for two minutes in private before my next interview isn’t a bad idea. Even thinking about the body-mind connection has me more relaxed, after a string of can’t-sleep-too-worried nights. I keep assuming that once my work situation betters, I’ll feel better. I should know better than that.

A friend gave me a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain last week. I can’t wait to see how my drawings improve after I’m done with it.  I’m not usually one for accurate drawings, but I do need to learn how to do them before I can intentionally distort the way I perceive. Anatomy first, wacky later.

A sketch of my copy of the book’s cover art.

Drawings and Direwolves

While updating my art blog this morning, I found this old colored pencil scene in my sketchbook. I have no idea when I did this, but I must like it more now than I did then.

Yesterday was good in the productive and useless categories alike. Tasks on checklist accomplished–check. (Checklist made after tasks accomplished–double check.) I also indulged in some Song of Ice and Fire geekiness (prompted by Sunday’s Game of Thrones episode) and spent the evening reading fan theories. I dreamed about Westeros to boot. Refreshing to get outside myself sometimes.

Imitating the House Stark sigil from the books’ appendix. I prefer this style over the snarling severed direwolf head used in the show.

Growing Trouble

No life from those seeds. I will need to buy my plants this season.

Things have been trying the past few weeks: our full-time temporary work was cut off suddenly, so we’ve moved into job hunt mode. I had a great interview for a position–I never think so about interviews!–but didn’t even make it to the second round. Loki’s had a rough time since his neutering, and hot spots have landed him in a cone. He’s handling it like a champ, though, staying pretty mellow most of the day.

In good news, I did get two paintings in the Oxford Cultural Arts Commission‘s recent exhibit. These two:

In other good news, a friend introduced me and Ken to The Bugle, my new favorite audio newspaper for a visual world. Andy Zaltzman‘s relentless nihilism has proven a perfect comfort for me when I’m stewing too long in my narcissistic frustrations. At least there’s the meaningless void that undos us all, right?

Maybe better than good news, I’m tucking into the Nag Hammadi library again. After some haphazard writing for the Internet over the previous six months, I’ve realized how much I miss writing about what really matters to me. Apparently what matters to me isn’t geek pop culture or news about space, although who doesn’t like reading about either? No: I need a place to explore paradox, I need to delve into intricate, expansive, unanswerable questions. I need to talk about silly Jesus stories from the 3rd century, so The Apocryphal Devotional shall rise again.

Planting Seeds

It may be a little late to plant seeds, but there they grow.

Cherry tomato varieties this year. More to plant when I find more egg cartons.

Ran out of agave nectar this week, but the coffee is still good just with cream.

I’ve been attending a comic art workshop across the river, and working on entries for an art contest. I finally submitted an article long overdue. (Yay!) The spouseman and I have been working overtime in a warehouse with dusty books to pay the bills. I have an editing project to busy me this weekend, and a magnolia tree brightening my window.

Loki continues to grow up into an awesome dog: quick witted and emotionally intelligent.

Had been so nostalgic for city life these past few weeks that I forgot the good things about suburban heres and nows that I’d be nostalgic for in another time. It’s been a strange nostalgia, mixed with feelings of helplessness and confusion since Monday. I hope Boston heals.

Anxiety is the Root of Laziness

Too often, when I think of doing something creative, my stomach tenses and my heart races. Without this physical sensation, as I learned from the Radiolab guys, I might not feel this too-familiar fear at all. (Thanks, body, for both permitting and discouraging my artistic attempts.)

Hearts race, stomachs tense, and anxiety sucks. However, knowing that this is the root of my laziness can help alleviate a few cycles of anxiety that start when I acknowledge my laziness. (Yes, Francis Bacon [or Thomas Hobbes?], knowledge is power, but it’s power that can be used by many parts of the mind and for many purposes, and not all of them are fruitful pursuits.) If I’m in an anxiety loop (anxiety–>laziness–>more anxiety) I might say:

“I don’t want to make something enough.”
“I must not be meant to do this.”
“Truly creative people are completely driven to make things; it pours out of them. If I have to fight lethargy to write something, isn’t that a sign I shouldn’t write at all?”

That last thought especially is riddled with false revelations. Just because so many writers and artists might describe a flow they enter when making something (“The words poured out of me,” “It’s as if someone else were painting it,” “I felt like a conduit”), doesn’t mean a feeling of anxiety isn’t present for them at other times. While I have also felt that flow a few times myself, maybe more importantly, why should flow and a sense of ease have a monopoly on creativity?

If flow isn’t there, but fear is, grant me the Opus Contra Naturam (Work Against Nature) of the Renaissance alchemists, and I will find another nature to work for.

On New Year’s Resolutions

I love the above graphic-ized quote from Neil Gaiman (confirmed his from his Twitter account). The “live as only you can” especially strikes a chord–the part of me that agrees art can be a life. The wish (blessing?) acknowledges that joy, creativity, and surprise–something different–are really what most of us are looking for in the new year. While I might vow to replace all refined sugar at home with agave nectar in 2013, what I really want is transformation. To be and do something different and unexpected. Simultaneously, to change for the better and be more myself.

But I find the resolve isn’t often present when it needs to be. It’s in the daydreamy planning times, the kinds that I’m always indulging in, be it December 31st or May 31st. To change, really, I need to change my behavior in the moment when it counts, and do what I really want to be doing when I don’t feel like doing it. (I remember hearing once that that’s what it means to grow up: to do what’s important even if you don’t want to or feel like it.)

Then Randall Munroe of xckd fame produces this gem:

For me, ultimately, there’s no sense in New Year’s Resolutions. When I’m ready to change, I will.