“ Art is very good for you, it really gets to the emotional truth of things, even if the emotional truth of things is a big extra slice of the weirdness cake.”
Very wise words from Burnt Paw I had to include here!
A simple ink sketch of a bird at rest. Sometimes the quiet moments—watching, pausing, waiting—are the deepest teachers. This drawing is part of my exploration of what I call the Quiet Practices—small ways of living from the inside out.
If you’d like to see more of my reflections, I share them here: https://forming20.com/
Sometimes wisdom comes in a joke,
and sometimes laughter carries truth.
Brian spoke like a sage,
Mike answered like a friend,
and together they held the room.
We draw to remember.
Not only the lines of faces,
but the presence of goodness,
the gift of voices that echo
long after the chairs are empty.
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.
One week on from Beltane Fire Festival 2025 and it stills feel surreal that’s it for another year, you know? It’ll be nice to get back to some semblance of normality/whatever… For now? Have a gar on me :-P :-)
My painting professor drew this diagram on the board and suggested that it is a diagram for a painting. "Begin with large areas, covering the canvas with general colors and shapes. Refine the shapes and begin adding details. Refine the details and work with smaller brushes. When you are adding marks that your viewers would not notice, be done." There is more, but that is enough to ponder for now.
