• What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war. Pablo Picasso

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There is Art in my Head and I Know It

And I Feel Thwarted.

And now I have to write about it after reading Felix Warren’s recent interview and some related ruminations.

I feel like I’m right on the brink of a half-dozen things if I could only find the time to focus and get on it and work on coaxing them out. And some of that is spiritual insight and revelation, and some of that is just… I have a lot of creative energy in me and I don’t have anywhere to put it. My life at the moment is in the sort of place where what I can do is poke at updating the Soup graphic in between crises with the kids. But Kid #2 starts school Friday, and maybe that’ll give me a bit more space, maybe.

But for the specifically religious/spiritual/magical projects:

I’ve been carving a godpole. First attempts at chip carving, but it’s a beginning on the thing, and we’ll see how the practice evolves over the years, since it’s likely not going to last forever. But anyway, I was hoping to have it done sometime soon, and I have not been able to scrape together the time + spoons + everything else to go do the hour of work a day on it that I can manage, physically. (And it’s not a straight-up godpole, because this is one of the complicated places. Not that they’re not all complicated places.)

I need to get the contracts done for Beewine Press, which is mostly a case of scraping together the cope to write the lawyer who’s doing them and see what we need to do. Which I just did, because it’s just embarrassing to write a blog post saying “I was too spoonless to send a two-line email.”

I need to work on the 2017 calendar line for Beewine as well. It’s already September, augh.

Not going to complain about my lack of studio right now. I think I’m just going to punt that to “When the kids are all in school, maybe I’ll be able to do more than pine after having something that will let me work with that again.”

Need to do more amuletcraft and beading design. Which means I need to figure out what the password is to the wiki where I stored the design work I had, heh. Whoops. But also actually do that thing.

I’m fucking around with two computer games – a clicker and something using RPGMaker – both with at least some religious content. (Okay, the clicker not as much as the other thing, but clickers are like that.) Which requires teaching myself coding, which I am doing on and off anyway. It’s a skill. (Maybe I’ll make a post about some of the stuff going into Amber Eyes – that’s the RPG – at some point. Without spoilers. Assuming I ever get anywhere with it.)

I should work some more on the bones for the tarot I’m designing, too. (Designing, not arting. I’m thinking I’m going to ping the artist and say ‘hey, can I commission a single card face’ and maybe we’ll get progress that way and be able to KS the whole thing after there’s enough to play with.) But that’s two books, the LWB for the deck and a making-of thing.

Speaking of books, there’s the book.

Then there’s the books about the Soup that people think I should be writing, which is, nnh. Maybe I can do that as part of pursuing a degree, which is not on the plate right now before the kids are all in school to say the least. (But I don’t want to be writing historical/sociological analysis without the credential or at least work towards the credential. Partly to make the work more solid with the actual skills that are useful there, but also because so tired of credentialism.)

There’s poetry in here that I almost know how to write, too. Almost. If I could only clear my head….

And then there’s the non-religious stuff, except that there is Creation in my veins and how can making worlds not be an act of god? Fiction writing. The webcomic I want to do as part of building up my comics skills in the hope of doing a graphic novel rewrite of a book the manuscript of which has been lost in computer upgrades since it was finished ~15 years ago. That sort of thing.

It’s like I’m not arting enough, so my system is throwing more and more projects at me, in the hope that one of them will start happening. Which is fantastic in some ways, but also… kind of exhausting and frustrating.

Sigh.

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