Breadcrumbs for Tomorrow

Monday I sat for an hour and stared at the large canvas I had sketched out with sienna oil paint in 2017. I loved the image and it terrified me so I ran away, for five years. And I ran away again on Tuesday to finish reading a good book. Today I stepped back in and noticed the smell of dust and the hardened tubes of paint and the evaporated tin of Turpenoid. Yeah, it's been a while.

I always said it takes me three days to get into a painting. This time it was five years and three days. I needed to give myself permission to never come back or allow myself the space to think about whether this truly is my choice and belongs to me. Meanwhile I have been writing.

My recent emotional seasonal shift to receive-mode means my inner thoughts are haunted and amplified. This has driven me back to the visual world willingly because like a superpower I can suddenly slow down and hear my pictures. And they tell me what they need. It's strange to me that I am this way. So I have to hurry up and use this mood before I turn back into an impatient overly energetic verbal person. Right now I am mute and visual and haunted.

Painting takes me to another land of color and shape where information bypasses verbal thought and the rational mind. It's as if my dreaming self has paintbrushes in her hands.

My stepfather used to say to me, "shut up and paint." But I am also a writer and I want to tell the story of my voyage. If nothing else it may help me take the trip again. This is me leaving breadcrumbs for tomorrow.

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

— Stephen De Staebler

The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.   

― Rene Magritte

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

— Ernest Hemingway

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

— Stephen King 

Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.
— Gustave Flaubert