A Smaller Splash

It's hard to concentrate when your spouse is generously trying to dance the baby to sleep, and the resulting howls compete with the music from downstairs. Poor monkey is teething.

I spent much of the last two weeks on altering these two pages of a children's board book. It's part of Willowing's free class, Art, Heart, and Healing. The first page is imagining my small self, and sending all of the wishes my adult self would have liked for that little person. The second page is supposed to be fulfilling the strongest desire my young self had, having a mother who cared for me. I substituted my young self with Lucy and Émile, thinking I should live in the present... but it did change the emotional flavor. I focused on what they might need that they aren't getting, instead of giving my own child self what she needed. Valuable exercise, but I may try doing it again, this time with me as the child.

My friend Clive McCarthy sent me a link to a New York Times article about David Hockney (who I have enjoyed ever since I saw the Hockney-grandizing film, A Bigger Splash.) It appears that Hockney still knows how to seize the moment, and the medium, and is producing creditable works on his iphone!

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