Today I did something I thought I’d never do… I spent a couple of hours drawing and sketching. You see, a couple of days ago, I bought an iPad to replace my first-gen iPad I bought in 2011.
Over the past couple of months, I found myself more and more interested in drawing apps, tablets, pens, watching YouTube tutorials. This proceeded from my experience of using photo editing software and thinking I would need some sort of pen control to work on fine details. The iPad isn’t really a graphic tablet in that sense, but the interest in the artistic potential of a pen and tablet was awakened.
I downloaded Procreate and I immediately gravitated towards blending photographic and graphic elements. Here’s the very first image I created using Procreate and to finish, Affinity Photo 2.
For this image, I used one of my photographs as a starting point. Today I started from scratch and I had to dare to draw. Though it is a little embarrassing, I’ll share some of the steps in the process of creating my image. This was the first step, I created some shapes, some textures, in hopes it would inspire me and to be frank, to learn to use these unfamiliar tools.
From here I decided that the top part of the image was more evocative and so I isolated it. Then I started experimenting with adding photographic elements. I decided upon one of the images from the Detritus series, a stand of trees in a clearing in the forest. I used these as inspiration for the creation of the final image.
The final image contains more elements sketched by hand and additional photographic elements. I decided to make it a black and white image, as it really worked well with the shapes and the mood of the image. Speaking of mood, I really like the atmosphere, beckoning, breathing melancholy. This is the finished work:
Working on this today, venturing into this world, I was dragged under, into the depths of melancholy.
Even though this melancholy, these intense feelings are my core, they also frighten me, because they can consume me, and have done so, at least partly, in the past.
I am very careful nowadays not to feel too much, keep tight reins on melancholy, hold control (even though… can the center hold? Is this falcon even listening anymore?). I can’t afford to feel too much, allow roaring feelings to disrupt the life I have so carefully built for stability, for even-keeledness.
And yet, I am so scared of losing these feelings, because they are the only ones that were ever real to me. Looking at my art, they are still there, but sublimated, too subtle, disguised (though the disguise looks just as dark and void-like as melancholy to most observers, I’d wager).
I am 48, alone, alive, and I don’t know what to do with my mind, my self-stunted emotions and the time allotted.
I fear that my carefully isolated equilibrium is stealing my life, as it has done for years, if not decades, now. That I’ll suddenly rouse myself from this paralytic slumber in ten, fifteen years, and find that now, truly, most of my life, in a real sense, is over.
I am scared to allow myself “out”.
But I think I’m becoming more scared of keeping me “locked in”.