ORIGINAL COPY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM DURING THE CHALLENGE
Doing this painting thing daily is taking a bit of a toll on my body. The hours of sitting in the studio have caused me to develop pretty tight muscles around my hips and lower back from leaning slightly forward to work on the tiny canvas. I’m fairly good at being aware of my posture, so I sit in a good chair, with a pillow to tilt my pelvis forward and a block to rest my feet on and a tabletop easel to put my tiny canvases on.
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And yet, still, something has brought about an immense inflexibility in my hips and lower back. (Yes yoga, yes, meditate, yes acupressure mat – tick tick tick). Still… I think life wanted me to be immobile, to face the things I keep busy bodying myself away from.
And so this morning, after a great big sneeze (literally) something tweaked and by lunchtime, I found myself immobile on the couch.. again.
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This time I decided not to take the emergency anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants, sleep it off and soldier through. I decided instead to relent. And so I wept. I cried about all the thoughts and people I was holding space for. I cried about the things I was giving up and my perceptions of self-worth.
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And then there’s the shitpickle realisation that the two equally valuable choices of ‘quit’ and ‘don’t give up’ may just be separated by a thin eyelash of a line. And how do you know if you’re on that line? Oh, gosh. This is hard. Damn hard.
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My unbelievably supportive guy, asked me if there was no way I could paint lying down with his help. And so today, I just exhaled some of my self ladled-on bullshit structure and painted flat on my back. Not my most intricate painting. But a direction of somewhere I’m longing to go.
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This is Sagewood. And she is the beginning of a prayer.
(artist retains all rights to print reproductions of this painting)
Inspiration : Tibetan prayer flags while having to lie painting on my back