With these blog posts, I often treat them like a themed, somewhat polished essay. It feels like practice for something, though I don’t know what. In my head I’m hearing “Dress for the job you want”. Do I want to be a writer? Fuck no. If I am somehow remembered for something and its writing, and my art is considered good but ancillary, I’m going to be childishly ungrateful. And that is my right.
This post, is not that. This is just a collection of recent experiences, my mini adventures, and uncategorized thoughts. Vicarious road trip let’s gooooooo–
I stopped back at the park in Florence yesterday. My apple pencil decided to go missing to force me to use my watercolors. I say it that way because my dad, who can find anything, was at a loss for 2 days. As soon as I got home from this trip it was lying completely in plain sight under the table. It was on some One Ring shit. I have to be grateful for the push to practice, though. I do think this sketch is a step up from before. It’s weird how the mental health work I’ve done on my anxiety and ego has benefited my art practice so directly. Anytime I start overthinking a voice in my head says “shut up, shutupshutupshup” and I go back into the flow state. I still struggle with comparison, though. Sargent’s watercolors always come back into my mind – the elegant, gestural shapes, the light so warm and real you can almost feel it on your skin, the mastery of color harmony….something to strive for can only be a good thing, I say to myself, in the hope it will feel that way one day.
we are doing some ego shattering work putting mine next to his, but to elucidate the difference.
Later on I went to a place just south of Casa Grand called the “dwarf car museum” – an absolutely fascinating treasure. It’s not a traditional museum, it’s more a workshop / celebration of a man with obscene talent, and a life consuming hyperfixation around building small versions of mid century American cars. I’m saying that like he’s dead, he’s very much alive, and spry for someone in his 80s. He was very sweet and friendly – though that impression may be partially from successful flattery. Throughout the conversation we had, he would stop to tell me that I was “very pretty”, and had “so much warmth and love”. In a different context it could have been weird, but it came across as just kind. Plus, I desperately want to let that feeling linger with me. Compliments like that, directed at me, are a flask of water in the Sahara.
This morning I chose to drive up to Payson, which is an hour or so north. I took the drive at around 6am and it was devastatingly gorgeous. Hot take but parts of it would give New Zealand a run for its money – at least with the added sauce of a pearlescent sunrise and rose gold light chiseling the ridges along the mountain range. I spent a little time at a hiking spot that had a crick with actual water – not something you run across in Phoenix, but Arizona has minecraft style abrupt biome changes. This area is fully a pine forest, and at 8:30am it was only 65 degrees.
There was no cell service, so I got to practice some raw meditation. Just the water bubbling and splashing along the rocks, about 27 birds having their morning kiki, ambiguous rustling, the cars from the freeway 100 ft away, and the usual chaotic puppet theater in my head. So…. mostly overstimulating. But there were moments of clarity. Unfortunately the watercolor didn’t come out this time. There were points at which I could have stopped that would have been more successful, but in this kind of exploratory sketch I err on the side of going too far and learning from that, sacrificing the outcome.
One of the biggest joys I get on these trips is listening to music. I get an almost embarrassing and childlike kind of euphoria, watching the cars fly past and realizing I’m flying with them, tearing up at the corniest 80s style anthem. I’ve switched over to YouTube Music since Spotify seems incapable of being anything other than cartoonishly evil, and have somehow made google look the lesser. In doing so, some music from years and years ago has popped up, and the feelings I’m being hit with have intersected this whole woowoo situation.
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Since the woowoo stuff wormed its way into my life, I’ve had these random intense hits of nostalgia, memories, feelings – that don’t feel like my own. It may just be that my mind is more open to incorporating intuitive cues and extraneous data into something more amorphous. It’s certainly more fun to pretend it’s little (or big) waves from the collective unconscious crashing onto my brain. One of the recurring ones is this feeling surrounding the year 2017 – I have no particular attachment to it, I can barely remember what I was up to then beyond it being another blur of dating a jerk and no-lifeing an MMO. But there is something about that year that I hear in certain songs (even if they werent released then) that bring up a VERY strong and specific feeling I have never felt before.
It’s a cold rush of adrenaline that feels a bit like stage fright – stage excitement? It’s mostly excitement. There’s almost a feeling of power to it, but it comes with a sense of exposure. I feel it most viscerally in my throat closing up and squishing towards my jaw, and my stomach bottoming out, so it feels like my whole torso is just empty. It sounds like being on stage I guess, but it’s not quite that intense. It’s like if a lower level version of that feeling was just the background noise of your day to day. …I was going to say it’s not as bad as chronic anxiety, but that exposure part feels really exhausting.
The two images/scenes that come through with it are (1) quietly drowning, going under, reaching towards the light that’s coming through the surface of the water, but your vision is fading. And (2) An empty, cold, echoey hallway. Maybe a wider space than that, but very plastic/metal/concrete liminal space. Fluorescent lights are still on, but everyone has left. An uncanny silence and stillness.
Your Love by Nicki Minaj brings it up the most, particularly that opening riff. A number of her songs from that era have it as an after taste. The one other song that really slams me in the face with it is Candy Paint by Post Malone.
>>robyns_ramblings 