What happened to my training wheels?!?

So, family crisis hits and two weeks go by with nary a brush stroke. As the dust clears, delayed assignments are handed in, and I pick myself up and get back in the race. I seem to have gone backwards, struggling with mixing ink correctly to get pale, yet clearly defined, grays for stems and flowers. A parallel experience seems to point to the folly of overemphasizing technique: Having noticed that my vocal range, once reaching the metallic stratosphere inhabited by adolescent favorites like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, has decreased, a combination of age and of simply not practicing the high end leading to the loss of a fourth (i.e. I once could hit an F5 and it had dropped down to a C5), I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of voice coach videos, and even less productively, of live recordings of various hard rock vocalists at various ages. Somewhere in there I began specifically practicing my current highest notes during my warmups before music therapy sessions, and somewhere I picked up a half step, then another half step. Fine, so after a month, I can hit a D5. But I recently realized this whole experience was not exactly “sparking joy,” but was rather about desperately grasping for the lost power of youth. Not entirely of course, and it’s never too late to develop good vocal technique. But it suddenly hit me I was not having fun by obsessing over technique. After listening to way too much metal shrieking, I had to cleanse my palate with a healthy dose of Tom Waits, with a Lou Reed chaser. The point? On a much simpler level, I find that worrying too much about the right way to paint orchid stems is a bit of a buzzkill. I want and value the foundation that basic technique offers, but I can’t let fear of not having the technique down stop me from “just painting.” That improv session a while back was by far the most generative thing I’ve done since I picked up the brush. I’m definitely going to return to that type of practice as I progress. In the mean time, I accept that I’m going to feel like a six-year-old whose parents just took off the training wheels of his bike. Buckle up folks, we’re in for a bumpy ride. But relax, you can’t hurt yourself painting.