leonardoab

This is my most used palette. It contains 12 colors from Mijello Mission Gold. It was the first artist quality paints I fell in love with. The way the colors blend with each other, the granulation produced by some of the pigments, how the paint moves across the page and the overall indescribable magic I see whenever the paint touches the paper. 

No matter how good or bad my head was I know that it will always be a magical  adventure whenever I hold a pencil or a paintbrush and that makes it worthwhile.

However, for the past couple of months, creating didn’t feel the same. I lost that feeling of excitement instead I felt extremely burdened and frustrated. I thought I was just having a slump so I needed to keep the ball rolling yet it didn’t help. 

I had so many experiences in the past that almost lead me to giving up making anything. I heard a lot of people say that I was wasting my time on creating nonsense and money on art materials that wasn’t even related to my college course. Some say I just copied from references or other artist’s work and that I have no talent at all. Others commented that my art is unappealing and that I am not even an “artist” but label myself as one (which I do not) just because I am drawing/painting. In spite of it all, I kept on creating. Those comments even became my motivation to be better. 

But now, I loathe it. For the past months, I hated what I was making or even using art materials. (I know I sound really dramatic yet this is how I feel so please be kind and don’t invalidate my emotions.) I feel strange because I don’t want to make art. I feel so listless, hopeless and unmotivated. My heart is so heavy. I feel so frustrated because I despise what I used to love so much, my solace, and it makes me extremely sad. Deep inside I know that there is always an up after a down, but I couldn’t seem to make myself believe in it.

That is why I couldn’t post anything here or reply to messages. I apologize but my head was not in the proper state. I’m frustrated and scared. I don’t know what to do. It’s a big deal for me because I made doing art a part of me. For me, making art is the only way I fight the demons outside and inside my brain. But now, how can I fight them, when the it I am fighting with is the one I am fighting now?

In this image lies a small, pale blue dot within the stripe on the right. This was photographed by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990. That tiny dot depicted here, floating through space, is the earth.

The significance of this photograph cannot be better summed up than by the following words of astrophysicist Carl Sagan:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.