Giuseppe 2.2
Hi Giuseppe - hopefully it is slowly warming up where you are, and some signs of spring are in the air - it is March after all! I'm in Guanajuato, sitting on the deck as I write this - the view from here this morning...
Not such a bad place to continue untying the many knots of a long life and post-processing a convoluted history... some of this post-processing is from raising a kid, and witnessing the full launch. Arif is travelling now, in his most loved place on the planet - Japan, Osaka specifically. It's a bit of a last fling after finishing all his courses at Uni in Holland. He'll start working at a tech start-up in Budapest in April. The world is his oyster. I made a drawing of him from a screenshot I took on a call with him. I overworked it, and it got very muddy, but it was a good way to process things, and I liked its intent. I was never that great at life drawing, except when it became expressionistic and gestural, but still never my forte.
I've continued to draw and push things forward - my time here in Guanajuato has been marked by an overwhelming fatigue - again, I see it as a physical outcome of ongoing emotional processing. My first week here had a few days with three naps. My time in San Miguel was marked by a lot of anger. Huge surf - like those giant waves in Portugal. I look at what I am experiencing here on this Mexico trip as right-sizing. Hopefully, this wave of soul-tiredness will pass too. Energies have been slowly restoring.
I have continued with Drawings from an Uncommon Emotional Landscape - musings from reading and listening to David Whyte. I have found it to be a very good balm, and it helps me process those bigger waves. It has been an even keel in stormy seas...
I had a dream the other night in which I encountered a very curious entity - it was a small, blind thing, a bit like a cross between a sea urchin and feather star. It was thrashing about endlessly and seemed to be trying to grab onto anything it could - I wondered if it was a manifestation of a kind of desperation. It was not threatening; it was like a small creature reaching out wherever it could. Yet it also looked like it was maybe a seed that could grow if it attached. I felt it was probably shrinking, but still it was memorable enough for me to recall it and draw this...
I did follow through on your assignment (yay!) – I built a few panels around the Despair drawing you highlighted - We spoke about adding to it and building a few things around it - maybe something to do with kids. That stayed with me, and I recalled a little narrative from my own childhood. Here it is:
On another note, I started looking at Flora, a creative workflow platform, and have been reflecting on what creating animation from these drawings might look like across that kind of production threshold. I'm still thoroughly enjoying hand-made and pen on paper, but I also wonder what scaling that - without losing a rewarding feedback loop - might look like... visual prompting?
Take the urchin/feather star sketch and run with it? Or maybe those animated skeleton drawings... or little vignettes:
Ok - talk soon.