These are 5 out of 12 images I did while processing the necessity of healing from life lessons. Heartbreak is prevalent throughout all the levels of tragedies in our lives. At times, the mourning period feels forced-- I never really want my wounds to heal because I feel they're the last of the love I carried for that "thing". The process feels like gold pouring into my gapping heart and I can only scream as it sears through my veins. It hurts to heal. It hurts that it has to happen.
A horizon of chalk—black sky heavy with silence, gold earth glowing with embered breath.
Between them, a thin line of turquoise, the pause where one world ends and another begins.
It is not sky, nor sea, nor sand alone. It is the threshold—a doorway, where silence teaches and light remembers.
Stand here long enough, and you may hear it breathe.
inking and seeing for better being — https://forming20.com/
This is no landscape you could ever stand in.
No observational drawing, no safe horizon line.
This chalk experiment is a dream unfolding in color: a golden field lit from within, a scarlet seam of fire at its edge, and a storm-heavy sky pressing down with ancient weight.
It feels like a place between worlds—where the conscious and unconscious meet, where memory and imagination blur. Some might see a battlefield, others a meadow after rain, and still others a veil between life and death. That is the beauty: the painting does not tell you what it is; it invites you to confess what you see.
Psychologists say we project ourselves onto images like these. So—what do you notice first? The light? The darkness? The burning red?
Perhaps that is not about the drawing at all, but about you.
An intuitive mix of fluid watercolor gradients and intricate fineliner patterns, wrapped up in a golden border. A little bit biological, a little bit whimsical.
My vision of the character ‘Smaug’ from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’.
Pencil sketch, coloured digitally on IbisPaint X.
Here is a passage from The Hobbit describing Smaug’s appearance: “There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed.”
The silver lining of this shelter in place is my daily afternoon walk to put my son down for a nap in his stroller. In our previously scheduled life, he would fall asleep on the drive home from school. These are non native eucalyptus and my beloved favorite tree, a Monterey pine, on a shady side trail of Golden Gate Park.
Against the weight of a storm-dark sky, tender stems lean forward—some bending, some breaking, some still reaching.
They hold their fire at the tips, waiting to bloom, waiting to burn, waiting to belong to light.
Perhaps this is all of us:
stretching through shadows,
searching for the thin, golden line that divides earth from eternity.
Colored pencil drawing on bristol of a golden pothos clipping in a glass of water. Visit https://youtu.be/5MZRA0jmGD4 for a time lapse video of the making of the drawing.
This is the forsythia fool's gold I asked the garden center to put on hold for me just before the governor's statewide shut down came through. I hesitated to bring it home because I had already bought 17 plants in anticipation of the isolation.
SA : Read a book today!
Some books that I really enjoyed recently:
- The Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler
- On the Calculation of Volume I
by Solvej Balle
- Dark Reading Matter by Jasper
Fforde
- Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel
Everett
- Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold by Ellen O'Connell
- Happy Hour by Ed Steed
What about you, which books have you enjoyed?
The handsome Talenthalus, consort of the Queen of Magic and her personal guard. Defender of the realms, he is the only one to remain at the queen’s side when the war against darkness is lost and they must begin anew, over and over, cycle after cycle.
Henry and Lucy caught these fish while fishing with Grandpa. The remarkable natural color—blue-green, gold, orange, violet, and pink—made the catch especially striking. A great subject for a watercolor study of color, texture, transparency, and reflected light.
