Turning my practice on its side

My brain feels fried. A constant bath of stress hormones, amygdala on red alert 24 x 7 even though nothings wrong nothingswrong everythingswrong? Strands of trauma tentacles seething through neuron soup, feelingsarentfacts but you know this is what is happening you feel it now what even is it?

Somehow trying to tie all the loose ends of school and life and work (or lack thereof) together under the umbrella of global compassion fatigue, days blending into nights blending into days blending into knights blending into spending into spent. Time spent. Money spent. Energy, gone. We’re all gone, we’re all real gone, man. Grief rattles under the surface of everything. Personal. Political. Polygonal.

I can’t keep it all together. I can haz cheezburger? What even is this? It’ll all come out in the wash. Plaintive poignant pensive prehensile utencil. Ink hits brush. Brush hits paper.

I’ve been avoiding painting for days on end. In desperation, I decided to completely turn my practice on its side and just improvise while listening to music. Fusion guitarist Dave Fiuczynski’s Planet Microjam, a collection of dense, frenetic, microtonal distorted electric jazz guitar that has always resonated for me as an epitome of defiant and authentic artistic expression that takes multiple listens to truly appreciate. Here is what I painted, allowing myself to be in the music, be moved by the music, and to really drill down into exploring the texture and feel of the brush and the many deeply varied ways this texture shows up through the ink on the paper. Some foggy and dreamy, others sharp and piercing, some rough and jagged, others smoothly transitioning from dark to light. I really really like what I’ve created here. Although part of me was observing myself and thinking how cliched and pretentious I was to be madly painting abstractly to “challenging” jazz, it actually felt wonderful. I felt myself get into the flow of it for brief moments, which were blissful, but even when quite self-conscious, I still got a huge amount of enjoyment out of this experience I’d created for myself, loving both the idea and the execution of improvisatory abstract painting to jazz, and at the same time, very much appreciating the unique qualities of this particular medium, Chinese ink and brush on rice paper.