Still Salty and Also Blue

100 Day Project Day 27

I have to put this in writing here, the world is terrifying. A lot of very rich people are doing very bad things, and some of them are doing it from a platform that is a public image portraying them as some sort of loving, inclusive hero, when what they are doing, which is going largely unreported, is making certain ideologies acceptable.

I’m a queer neurodivergent woman, and the rising tide of fascism, and the comfort with, and apologism for genocide, in one part of the world, combined with things like the new UK government defintions of extremism, which is coupled with the inclusion that people can be flagged for the very things I mention in the first five words of this increasingly wild sentence, and breathe, is leaving me bouncing between abject terror and abject rage.

Fifty years ago Scottish workers downed tools and refused to repair warplanes that had arrived her from Chile in solidarity with Chileans subjected to the horrors of Pinochet’s coup. Where is the spirit of Nae Pasaran! today, as UK weapons, some manufactured in Scotland, are being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank?

How do I sit here and make art when forms of Holocaust denial are being normalised, at the exact time this genocide is ongoing?

It feels incredibly pointless.

I have left my little oil painting waiting for one last pass yet again today, and instead managed a short session on this strange rendition of a very old photo (left) and another short session working with a Neocolor II and water, doing a value study.

I feel I may have been a bit intense with my ink and salt wash yesterday, which is resulting in me going a bit intense on the watercolour layers I laid in today. I’m kind of liking it, though, even if the end result might end up really bad. There are definitely things to take away and use on other pieces later.

That’s what it is all about.

I often notice that taking a photo of a piece leads me to notice things I don’t notice when just looking at the piece itself. I think that’s probably similar to the way viewing a painting in a mirror can help with identifying problems. So I’m looking at my blue crayon lady as a photo uploaded to this page, and she just seems racked with sadness. I’ve unintentionally created a drawing of the emotion I am feeling a lot just now.

Being a mega-empath is not a comfortable state just now.

At least I managed more words today, and I have not broken my streak.

Til the morn,

Ceasefire now,

Suzanne