So, I decided the other day that art is really the only thing that...let me think of how to word this.....

I don't really mind working 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, except that between that and my boys, it doesn't leave much energy or time or thought or, or time left for *seeing* things, so that I can paint or draw. I don't especially begrudge the fact that I barely get by, except that it it leaves me feeling uneasy about rent and bills, etc. What I begrudge is that basically, I live for art and for thought, and there isn't really any time for it. There isn't enough time to soak in the things that I love, their scents and textures and colors and forms and sounds....it all gets drowned in the stuff I sick to death of and by the time I escape from that, I am as drained as a wrung out dishrag, with little ....:searches mind for word:...vitality? creativity? life?....left over from which to pull the art, to really *feel* the subject and to see its essence. There is no passion left, and I am so dispassionate by nature anyway, that I crave it, I long to have feeling, to be excited and enthralled by something.

Anyway, I saw an orchid (yes, the moth orchid) on sale...there were several actually, but I bought this one because it was the sexiest, most passionate looking one of the bunch, the most erotic. It is a beautiful shade of cool blue-pink, with magenta wings and tongue framing and beckoning around the flower's sex organs. I find all flowers sexy, but this is one of the more explicit ones I've seen. I'm only sitting here wishing I'd gotten the white ones with pink/magenta trim. They were more modest thoguh, virginal in a way. They would have been easier to paint- this one's color is hard to match even thoguh I bought two new tubes of watercolor specifically to paint it. I will have to work and experiment to find the precise shade it is. See, if it had been white, I might have eventually loosened up to the point where I'd interject any color I wanted into it. Ultramarine blue orchids..... But with this one, I am so in love with the color that it's hard for me to go past it.

So the plan is thus: to paint this thing, the same plant, until it wilts or the watercolor paper runs out or I have nothing at all left to say about it.

Now, there is another thing, and I hesitate to mention it. When I am satisfied and happy and contented, I don't have much desire to paint. If I am debilitated by pain to the point where I can't eat, sleep, or get out of bed, I can't paint, either. But there is a balance, and it seems that solitude is an essential ingredient. Maybe. I do know that most of the work I've been pleased with has come from times when I was really frustrated and wound up, or longing and pining.

All I've ever really wanted out of life is to be an artist and to love someone. Love is too chancy a business to invest my whole being in. So, I have to do the art, I have to make time for it, or I'll die and be nothing but a time-punching drone with a body.