Hello to whoever is reading this :)
Last week on Sunday, I decided to go to a nearby hiking spot. I had only climbed a handful of steps that I lost sensation in my legs. It was bad enough that I had to sit out the entire time clicking pictures of the sky and seeing people huffing and puffing their way through to the top of the hill.
At that moment, I felt nothing but pity on myself and my body. To be sitting there, breathless and numb was very painful to admit. The days that have followed have not seen me operating in 100% capacity. I still feel fatigued, unable to sometimes walk for more than 2000 steps at a time and chained with nausea.
In times like these, it is the hardest to feel kind for yourself and to give your pain the acknowledgement it deserves. However, I have set myself a very small yet challenging-enough goal and I do end up ticking it off on most days.
Full moon
Monday was full moon night and I wanted to take a breather from overthinking and sit with the moonrise. Indigenous cultures have dedicated rituals around the lunar cycle and specially around the full moon. While I am yet to discover these beliefs of cleansing myself, I did discover that aligning yourself with cycles gives you a sense of mark making in time.
Just like celebrating birthdays that come once a year, a full moon occurs every month and can be a natural mark to stop in your tracks, reflect and realign with your intention for the next month. It is easy to imagine in the cultures where there was no clock, a full moon would mark a new beginning and thus, would call for a celebration.
I laid out fairy lights in my balcony and spent more than two hours just sitting with the moon seeing it rise in the sky. Here are a few pictures with Orbit enjoying her full moon ritual.
Exploring paper
This week, I started exploring making on different kinds of paper. I am a paper hoarder and find it hard to part ways with any nice packaging paper but when it comes to drawing, I don’t experiment often. I have been feeling stuck on that for quite a bit and considering only I could get myself out of it, I gathered a few papers around and just starting drawing on them.
Golden cardboard paper is from a bakery used as solid base for pastries.
From a sketchbook with a few pages left
The packaging of a dress that my brother gifted me (I am the luckiest sister in the world)
A butter paper that was in the folds of my dress
I thoroughly loved working with the fragile papers and felt a close connection with my drawing and the medium. I’ll continue this series as much as I can.
Reading
I am still reading Lust for Life (1934) a biographical novel written by Irving Stone about the life of the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his life and work. The book is a gorgeous biography and I also created a few pages of art journals based on the quotes in the book (which would have been taken directly from Van Gogh’s letters) and will write a separate post on the book when I am finished with it. Reading a book published in 1934 is a fascinating journey into that time and it helps to see what was acceptable during that time.
It does get easy to drown in the cultural artefacts of today, especially when it comes to reading choices but I’ve had a great time reading books that were published before I was born.
In the spirit of Vincent, listen to Starry Starry Night on Youtube :)
Listening
It had been some time that I heard the podcast ‘Art For Your Ears’ by the Jealous Curator. This week, I heard Danielle talking to Petah Coyen. Her work is big, bold and gorgeous and what I loooved hearing from an established artist was her journey. She tells about years and years where she was making bad art and how it was a battle of time with her full time job and her art.
I am going to have to hear that episode once again and make an attention map out of it. It was pure gold!
I’ll leave you with the four of the five panels I drew a while back.
Thanks for reading! Hope you have a lovely week :)
About the ‘From the Studio’
This is a letter that I intend to publish every Sunday. My wish is not only to look backwards in reflection but to use the reflection as a guiding principle for the next week. I am impacted by influences every moment of the day — literature, spoken word, cinema, fellow humans and my work. I am hoping to use this space as the vessel to share all the beauty I found in the world that week.