It's been a while... and quite a bit has happened since the last blogging... not least of which is that I've given up working for the company I was with, and have taken the plunge into being 'an artist' which sounds very scary and ethereal to say.
What's prompted this is the recent brush with prostate cancer, coupled with a difficult boss... and a very boring and frustrating job. The other tipping element was the Stanford speech that was given by Steve Jobs a few years ago, that I saw on the TED site the day after he pegged it. In it he says that if you wake up for too many days in a row and can't answer the question ' if this was the last day of my life, would I be doing what I'm about to do today?' in the affirmative, then you probably should have the courage to change what you're doing. As Wayne said, 'it's easy for HIM to say that!' .. but it kinda ate away at my already weak propensity to stick with the job, and then events conspired so that I was going to be getting a disciplining and orientation meeting to straighten out my crap performance. I just made it easy for them instead.
So I've leapt into the void... again!
This time though, it's for something that makes some sense to me... rather than being a half cocked idea. If I blow this, I'll feel that it's unfortunate rather than that I made a mistake.
I'm working on my first commission this week. It's only a small and not very expensive portrait of the wife of an ex work colleague. It's a bit of a struggle though as the picture that I'm painting from is poor.
I'm also doing life drawing twice a week if I can, and once a week for sure. The for sure one is a class that I'm involved in the running of, so that happens every week, and the other one only happens if I can get out of the house in the evening which largely depends on Daile's schedule.
Daile is super flat out right now, so it's me and the girls a lot more than it used to be, and my being around is a great thing for them - not having to go to after school care and that kind of thing. I also got collared to make some masks/hats that look like grasshoppers for the school play, (Phoebe's class). There's 25 of them to make!
Not only that, but when they asked me to make some stands to put some 'grass' props against, I asked them what they meant and said 'you don't want to do it like that you want to do it like this....' and then they all reckoned they couldn't so I've ended up making the grass too. Like below but 6 off all together...
We had Halloween since the last blog too.. Here's the Feeb helping me make the pumpkin and Matilda playing the part of a zombie. (just before losing the cast!)
We got the cast off last week, and then they took another X-ray...
...Matilda's exuberance at getting her arm back was short lived as the X-ray showed that there was still a significant gap between the broken bones. There was the growth around the outside of the break, which is holding it together but inside, surprisingly, looks so much the same as it did, that I had to look closely to see the difference between the 'then and now' images. Matilda saw it and got it straight away. She was upset as she'd been looking forward to returning to her life as a surrogate Bear Grills... and asked if we could postpone our family trip to Fraser Island until it's fully restored to outback strength. Bless her.
Finally, here's a picture of the Feeb... with the beginnings of 'attitude'. :-(
No comments:
Post a Comment