Learning, Again, and A Look Back

Tomorrow is the last week of Kat’s painting class.  I’m a little sad about that but am so happy that it’s gotten me painting again, plus I’ve really enjoyed the group of people in class.  

In so many ways it felt like starting over and/or that I have been relearning things.  One of the things that surprised me (but shouldn’t have) is that continuing to show up and work in the face of frustration is the best thing to do, because usually some sort of break through or ease tends to follow.  

This week painting has been enjoyable and I feel like several of my paintings just sort of happened.  Not everything has worked, but I’ve felt more presence and ease.  The prior week everything felt like a struggle.  

Here is one of the two paintings since I last posted.  I am almost done with the annoying black paper that I purchased and am using up!  Darn paper.  It tears sometimes into the painted part when you pull it up.

I went a little overboard with the reflections back up on the paper, but I explored that a lot this week along with just picking unabashedly loud background colors.  

The look back is, of course, to three years ago today.  When I was looking at my phone, Google popped up a series of photos I took exactly three years ago and it was like traveling back in a time machine.  Even before I looked up my blog post from that day, I remembered that it was a Wednesday and I had been planning to go to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see an exhibit that was closing soon.  I decided to risk going, because I really wanted to and I also thought it might be the last opportunity to do something like this for awhile.  I remember not touching any door handles with my bare hands and other things like that and, at the time, those precautions felt so foreign.  

I suspect a lot of people will be looking back and thinking about the before time.

At times, I’m aware of the continued impact.  One area is that while I enjoy and crave social connection, it’s so much harder to initiate.  Really long or large social interactions also seem to take a lot more energy than the before time.  Last week was the MONDO juggling festival and when I was talking to some friends, I felt reassured that I am not the only one feeling like this.  

One of the other losses throughout much of the pandemic was my art practice.  I just could not muster the energy and brain power to keep it going, so I let it mostly drift away and it’s taken three years to get back to a new starting place.