Ursula Vs. Her Hindbrain

Today is a make-prints, make-art, wander around forgetting where you put things day. Fooling with this painting using oil pastels, which I had a mad urge to try–two of my favorite artists, Susan Seddon Boulet and Oscar Chiconi use ’em over acrylic ink washes, and since I’ve been playing with acrylic ink washes, I figured, what the hell? It’s interesting. I can get some neat textures, but I suspect I must work much larger than usual in order to get any good crisp detail. The first experiment with this will be uploaded shortly.

On the bright side, this appears to be what my hindbrain wants me to be doing, because it’s calming down. Yesterday was tough. Things were definitely being worked on back there, and it obviously wanted more processing power, so it was diverting resources from the rest of the brain. This sounds absurd, I know, but it’s the best analogy I can come up with–it’s as if the wall between the me-that-does-the-thinking and the weird, freaky, busy muse-ridden subconscious bits in the back got moved forward, so that the me-that-does-the-thinking was suddenly in a rather smaller space than usual, and the slight echo you get when you think something didn’t echo, so my thoughts felt really flat, and there was this impression of swelling, busy activity on t’other side of the wall. Also, I was walking into doorframes a lot.

Okay, that sounds like I’m a certifiable loon right there…Saying that the wall has dark wood paneling and a bare light bulb hanging in front of it doesn’t help, probably. I really don’t spend that much time contemplating the inside of my head, particularly when little birds and wombats and whatnot are way more interesting, but occasionally these things happen.

But anyway. Working, somewhat distracted. I don’t know if other people wander around the house with a painting in their hand, put it down somewhere, wander off again, and then spend ten minutes scouring the studio for it when it’s really sitting on a chair in the living room, but I’ve been doing a lot of that today. I assume once the ‘ol hindbrain is done with whatever it’s working on, and either spits out orders or admits defeat, I will get full functionality back. Which would be nice. I mean, I may not use my short-term memory all that much, but I like knowing where it is when I need it, ya know?

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