Growth

Last week I celebrated a birthday. I emailed my friend who lives in Texas progress on goals I've made. It has come through hard work and intention. After a stack-up of losses and grieving those, one goal is to put myself out there both figuratively and literally. I joined a local art society to meet people, and submitted some 2D works for the first time publicly this year. 

I started drawing and painting again in 2021, using my ipad, when visiting my mom, who was ill. The image above is one I drew after that. There are things I would fix in this, but I've learned that fixing means you can lose stuff, so I leave it alone. It's a compilation of myself and people I know who are, or were, doing intensive caregiving. People who were caregivers for parents, who are caregivers for adult children who are disabled, and some who were caring for adult children and aging parents at the same time. We are in that developmental stage. 

An opportunity to see the plaster lathe walls in my granddad's old house led to wanting to do some "textural documentation" using gravestone rubbing techniques. I went up to what was my Granddad's house and took a rubbing of the stump of an old tree there. I want to use these "gathered textures" in printmaking somehow. After I set it up, I noticed that the paper and the bottles I was using to hold down the paper looked like a picnic. 

Traffic was definitely slowing down!  Here's a detail from that rubbing from that stump. I walked beneath that tree so many times as a girl. 

I want to take more textural documentations of places I have been, but also of places that I hope to be favorite places. I'm still figuring that out, and that's part of growing.