It has been a bizarre year. All I wanted after the nightmare that was 2019 was an entirely uneventful year. Nothing like the whole world sinking into pandemic chaos to make your problems feel small. I don’t have very high hopes for next year since we’re still in the full swing of the pandemic right now. Then once the pandemic itself is under control, there are the economic repercussions that I assume will last for decades.
The world has moved on.
I’ve thought a lot about how the world has moved on lately. I keep making comparisons to the world in Stephen King’s Dark Tower universe. It’s world completely broken and ravaged by time. It’s as if it is the end of the world, after our present time. After war and knowledge has destroyed everything beautiful and good. It is a world that is fundamentally broken at the core with the only hope an endless tower where the end is only the beginning.
Obviously, our world is nowhere near as bad as the Dark Tower universe. It’s just interesting to make comparisons. This year has just been so memorable in all the wrong ways. There were so many times when I sat back and thought “This is history.” I’m living through historic events that will be taught to schoolchildren. Is this what people thought when they witnessed the moon landing? I know I felt this way watching live news as the plane hit the second tower on 9/11. There are just things you know will be remembered because they were just too amazing or fucked up to be forgotten. The modern world has been brought to its knees.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve been in a very privileged and fortunate place financially and otherwise. I’m grateful that things have been going well for me thus far. Not perfect, but I recognize that life could be a lot worse. I know others have suffered considerably more than me directly because of this pandemic.
Lets face it. You didn’t come here to read about the pandemic. We’re all going through it together right now. My opinion on it is just another drop in the bucket. You came here to see and read about art. The pandemic did affect me and my art though. I painted less this year than I have in past years.
It isn’t that I lost interest in painting, it’s more like I decided to focus more on other things this year. I remodeled the shed in my backyard into an art room, homeschooled my kids, started raising chickens again, got more into houseplants, gardened, spent more time with my husband, and most recently, got into nail art and taking more time for personal care. I also got a rotary tool for Christmas, so we’ll see where that leads me.
I didn’t participate in Inktober this year despite looking forward to it since last year. When it came time to finally do it, I was mentally exhausted from the September Strada Challenge I had just completed. I wanted to do the challenge in November or December, but instead decided to focus on doing holiday crafts.
This January I plan on not participating in a challenge as I have done for the past several years. I have a couple of commissions I need to focus on and complete. I have plans on doing at least a couple of personal challenges later on this year though. I want to paint another series of landscapes in oils, a houseplant series in oils and a series of skulls in ink. I still enjoy doing 30-day challenges, but I think I need to allow myself a little more flexibility in the upcoming year.