Noticing-Observing-Documenting

This week for the first time in months I managed to set aside a whole day for my practice. Having not had a chance to paint for so long it felt like loosening rusty joints, with screeches, squeaks and scrapes accompanying every contact of brush with canvas. At the end of the day I had a blissful feeling of exhaustion and time well spent. Not that the outcome of the painting itself was in anyway special, but being within the process again is. For the past couple of weeks or more honestly the last couple of months, my thoughts have dwelt less on the content of my practice and more on the making of time and space to do it. I put myself in a position where rather than finding a way through, I threw up more barriers so that I couldn’t get close enough to my fears to face them. Painting today felt like having the courage to get under the bed and prove there was no monster there – there’s no monster, but there’s a lot of dust, fluff and cobwebs to deal with, but the monsters gone – that is until it’s there again….