When Carefully Crafted Intentions Crash

The other week as work came to a close and the weekend was dawning, I was asked what my plans were. I hadn’t made any yet. From my experience I’ve found that if I don’t plan on doing something, I’ll end up doing nothing. Saying as much, a free music festival a couple of hours away was suggested.

So I went home and spent over two hours planning a whole weekend of visiting little villages, art galleries, markets, the music festival, and camping. Upon finding peace with my plans, I flopped into bed and laughed, “What if something changes and I did all that planning for nothing.” And so SUNDAY morning, after a day of procrastination and Saturday night in my own bed, I went for a drive and visit a handful of galleries and villages along the Clarence River. I refused to let the whole weekend get devoured by my low spirit. After a number of lovely conversations with gallery owners and artists and happening upon an artist demonstration, I realised that, while I was pissed off with myself for ruining my own plans of something that may have added up to much more bubble and fizz, I was actually lucky to have a whole bunch of unexpected moments, or little treasures found still.

And then this weekend was pretty much the same as last. I made a plan to go bushwalking, camping, driving around the streets of a few towns I’ve never been to before, and going to some market thing. I knew all these things were needed to fill me emotionally as I was still riding the a depression wave and refusing to be taken under by it. And then mid-week my back finally gave in. That’s another thing I do to push back the depression – work my arse off till I am in a lot of pain and then keep going more, and more. It’s kind of like a form of self harm to redirect or mask the spiralling thoughts screaming in my mind which translate to strong and debilitating physical feelings. I had to scrap the whole plan again. And my work plan. I handed in my resignation Friday morning.

The screaming in my head was bad all week. Then through my stupidity I added the physical pain that stopped me in my tracks. Then my stupid problem thought I can’t seem to kick of not wanting to let the team down had me crying on and off all day. And then, I made a small mistake that a customer was so cranky about my coworker had to take an extra two hours after work to drive the correct item to them before going home and I was kicking myself all day for it. I was doing well, hey! So on Saturday when my body did it’s usual, waking between three and five in the morning, before the Kookaburra’s laugh the fresh new day into existence, with the rain drizzling down, I knew I had to force myself out of the house (which pretty much means my bed). It took another 5 hours before I captured some rain water for a coffee and finally left the house.

I visit another few galleries which were igniting in some small ways, met an artist who made my day, and realised that the artworks that stood out to me all had a similar theme – dark, cloudy, rainy. Sitting in the car at the second rain washed lighthouse lookout for the day I realised I was looking at the artwork themes still. I even saw upside-down storm clouds in waves… one of which I took a photo of and today tried drawing as a storm cloud. The drawings were practicing do put on a canvas and cover in paint today, but I was kind of sinking under that depression wave today so no paint tubes were opened.

Thinking about how I need to plan ahead to keep me moving, but then how the best laid plans can all go to shit, and also how spontaneous movements can bring as much joy as planned, if not more, I discovered something. I figured it’s the little treasures discovered, the bubble and fizz, the internal electric zaps, and adrenalin shots that lift my spirits up when my chemicals are bringing me down. It’s been what I’ve replaced my meds with. The chemicals produced and released from my brain interpreting the seemingly-ordinary as extra-ordinary fills me up emotionally and keeps me moving onward and upward.

In conclusion,
Plans can go fuck themselves. It hurts too much when things don’t go the way we expect them to;
Not planning my non-work days can fuck me over too, therefore it’s a lose lose situation;
Signing up to a dating app again to seek a boost in self-worth is a really doing the opposite;
And the following artworks and photos, my little treasures from this weekend, are a good representation of what the inside of my head was like this weekend. Ha.

Let me leave you with a quote that ChatGPT created with a few prompts from me.
“When plans get smashed, it feels like a sudden storm that ruins a perfect day. But unlike the weather, we have the power to pick up the pieces and rebuild a new day.”

When your phone predicts an emoji

This morning I decided to make a ‘Touch Tally’ for my year so far. That’s where I added up the amount of human touch I’ve had in the last 3 months. “That’s a hard thing to do”, I hear you say. But no, not if you are in my shoes.

When catching up with friends and family for the first time in about a week, a hug is often a kind gesture afforded to you. In my current situation I can easily average that to 5 hello and 5 goodbye hugs per month, which equals 10 hugs. A general, loose, kind gesture hello and goodbye hug lasts about 3 seconds or less. That’s 30 seconds per month. That’s 90 seconds over the last 3 months. Lets add another 12 seconds for my birthday because the 4 housemates gave me birthday greeting hugs. We’re almost half way through April when writing this so I could probably safely say that I’ve had a total of 2 minutes of adult human contact this year. I could add another 250 minutes for child human contact. So 252 minutes in 3.5 months. My daughter Belle with 2 toddlers would probably be envious of me. Haha.

And then after calculating all this in my notes app the predictive text on my phone thought I might want to add an emoji. It’s suggestion…

Spot on, phone!

Recently whilst travelling solo I felt that the number one thing I missed the most was someone I talk to. It was true. However since moving back to the Northern Rivers NSW that’s no longer a missing ingredient in my life. Touch has taken the number one position again now. It’s a killer! I’m a kinaesthetic kind of person. I miss being able to touch and feel, navigate and mentally map a human body, and I miss the feeling of being touched sooooo bad. There’s only so much eyes, imagination, and toys can do to fill that lonely space. Haha.

THE BIRD BIRD BATH

I like checking out interesting and creative artworks and exhibitions. I also have a lot of ideas for my own creations that usually stay stuck inside me. I especially like the idea of trying to make three dimensional stuff.

When I was a wee-tacker I started out with moulding beeswax from our beehives and making stuff with clay scraps from my mother’s pottery workshop. Then I moved on to papercraft creating gift cards, pop ups in the binding of books I made for my own stories, and then moved on to all sorts of origami in all sorts of sizes. As a teen I turned to making things with junk found around the house using glue, tape and wire to hold it together. Oh, and I made a Stonehenge replica with cut logs for seating around the campfire in my backyard. Then in my later teens I started sculpting paper and masking tape into small statues and characters from famous artworks like The Scream which I photographed in different places to make it look a bit like the painting. I then turned to twisting up wire to create characters and animals. I liked creating greyhounds in action poses and recreated Russell Drysdale’s Man Feeding His Dogs just for fun. I kind of wish I’d entered it as my HSC major artwork. Then as an adult I used to collect metal junk that looked interesting with the intention of making moving sculptures with them. I never did for various reasons. I left all my metal junk behind when I moved 4 years ago and it was promptly disposed of. So the other day I decided to waste some precious money on learning to weld and other techniques for making metal sculptures.

Upon arrival we were given a cut down red gas bottle bowl and told we were to make bird baths and could use any of the materials in the junk pile provided. The first thing that stood out to me was an old flaking paint fence section with scroll bits. I immediately saw a lyrebird tail in it… aaand shrugged it off and tried finding something simpler to do. I then saw some weld mesh stuff and saw feathers in it. I gave in to my imagination and decided a lyrebird bird bath it was. And so the creating began.

I spent a bit of time on the grinder cutting things out, then the pliers cutting and bending the weld mesh into 5 large feathers. And once everything was cut and bent into shape it was my turn to learn how to weld.

Before welding the sculpture I had to learn how it all worked of course. For my first ever join weld I did a neat little job of “stacking dimes” which had the teacher questioning how long I had been welding for. Haha. She was just a good teacher I think. I absolutely loved welding. Below is an example of really messy welding on my part. I had people lined up waiting to use the welder so felt rushed. I did clean it up a little with the grinder later.

The photo of me welding here was a staged photo. I had my head much closer to the the work when actually doing it and may have got a little burnt through the gloves from trying to hold tail feathers in place. Haha. But it was so much fun that I’m wondering where to find a workshop area I can do more in and which welder I should buy. Buuut seeing as the first year would probably be spent learning, practicing, and as a hobby for myself, not for selling, then the expense in shed rental and welding gear will probably mean not doing anything for a long time yet.

For a first attempt and only a few hours to whip it together, I’m pretty happy with the result. You’ve got to start somewhere, right? Here’s hoping I can do something again soon, have more time, more junk to choose from, and get better and better with practice.

Picking up pencils

When I started out on my [short lived] travelling adventure, I had this random idea to create non-posting postcards (you’d have to get inside my odd brain to understand what I was thinking there) of all the locations I stopped over at or things of interest in the area. So I bought one black and one white sketch books the size of postcards and a pack of watercolour pencils so I could play with watery effects if I felt like it. I honestly can’t recall putting pencil to paper to draw anything besides stick figures since high school… which was 5 years ago. hahaha. Nah, 30 years. I had no clue if I could draw anymore and what I did draw back then was immature. I preferred sculpting in art class, especially wire and masking tape, not both together. Sadly I don’t have any photos of my fave little wire sculptures and maybe, if I’m unlucky, my parents have only a couple of dodgy masking tape ones. So was I wasting my money here? I was soon to find out.

I mostly took photos on my phone and copied from them later. One time I attempted to draw a sunset on a storm cloud as it happened. You won’t see that here because it turned out horrid – the cloud changed shape and the colours changed quickly. haha. Here are my works so far in order of picking up the pencils for the first time in 30 years. I kind of stopped when I stopped travelling. I only just picked up the pencils again the other day.

I was staying with Belle&Co near Shellharbour. The escarpment kind of fascinates me a bit. I imagined it to be like a sandcastle being bitten away at by waves. It really does make you wonder how formations like this did come to existence. Imagination is a fun thing to play with too. Like, maybe dinosaurs weren’t the only large things once upon a time, but waves were too. Maybe Tsunamis were a common thing. Continental lift and earthquakes are just too boring. I started from the top and by the time I got down to where suburbia crept up into the hills I got bored, so just speckled a grey patch. For a first in 30 years I thought it was alright. I then tried out the water aspect of the pencils and made a bit of a blur of the cliffs. Oh well. I didn’t learn from this mistake just yet though.

I used to live in the Snowy Mountains and love Snowgums. This one was just outside my caravan. After a week of looking at it, I decided to attempt to draw it. The entire time I had the words of my art teacher scolding me, “You have to make the leaves and branches look 3D!” because my trees were ALWAYS flat in dimention and colour back then. I’m going to be honest here and say I was pretty bloody impressed with the result. I spent half an hour sitting there in front of the tree capturing it’s colours and shades. I really liked the effect with the black paper too. The use of black paper was inspired by the way the moonlight hit the tree trunks at night making them seem like a bunch of ghosts standing around my van protecting me.

This was the view from the campfire at my next campground. I failed to get the perspective of the horse rail right, but the colours are all for real. The grass was in seed and had a nice pink and purple hue.

This was ruined by my attempt to play with the water again. I learnt my lesson this time. I had a bunch of detail in there that just washed away and blurred it. Oh, in case you didn’t pick it, the good looking feather on the left is the real one I copied then stuck in my book to keep.

This one was an attempt at a close up of the weave and unravel of a bit of blue nylon rope left on the horse rail. I enjoyed watching the wind toy with it. I was starting to unravel myself at this stage and felt as grounded as the tail of the rope blown about by the wind. The black smudge on this is another lesson I learnt in drawing – don’t draw black things on a facing page. That’s coming up.

Yeah, yeah, it has an interesting shape. It is true to form though. This was drawn from a photo looking out from inside a cave on a walk I really enjoyed that day. Fossil day for me. Normally a backpack gets lighter as you hike because of the food and water being withdrawn, however mine got so much heavier on the return trip for some strange reason.

I left the mountains a week earlier than planned and went to visit Jesse, Rach and fluffy puppy Jengo. On the way I stopped here and went for a pre-sunset kayak and then had to capture this reflection from the mozzie-free comfort of my caravan. After this I figured I needed to buy more pencils in more shades. There were what I call nests of sticks poking up out of the lake here and there. Looking at them and their reflections the next morning I could imagine them as alien writing characters standing in mid air. I could have invented a new alphabet with them if I wasn’t in a hurry to get moving before it got too hot.

This was an experiment with shadow. I wanted to draw an F14 Tomcat there but ended up being intrigued by the shadows the planes were casting. You could almost guess the time of day looking at this one.

No effort was put into this drawing. It was just a way of capturing something that was interesting at my next overnight stop. And I was starting to tire of trying to come up with something to draw from each location I stopped at. It is a pretty interesting looking hall in real life.

I wanted to try drawing something underwater and make drop concentric circles over it. I couldn’t get the rings right so it’s just a Koi, not Coy, with weird circley things. haha.

And this was my first attempt at a portrait in over 30 years. I made a couple of mistakes but wasn’t going to go buy an eraser to clean them up, or start over. This was also where I decided to end my travels. I was feeling lost and confused inside. I needed to go back to where I felt stronger – a place I’ve decided to call home.

I stopped drawing after this but just the other day I picked up the pencils again, just one pencil really, to draw as a way to express how I felt inside that morning, hoping that giving it an image would help me ‘see’ (lol) what I needed to work on. This time I was drawing from my imagination. The face one was rushed after the ‘leave for work now’ alarm went off.

Yeah, they are all a bit dodgy, but this is another part of me for my “galería”. A part I actually didn’t even know was in there. I surprised myself. I don’t feel the desire to follow it into some artistic flare. I still want to do sculpture instead. It’s interesting what you can find inside when you just have a go.

By the way, if you haven’t seen my first coiled basket post from September 2022 already, I just opened the post for public access. I can’t remember why I locked it in the first place. It’s part of my “galería” too.