#practic

One of several painting projects this month...

Starting out with some quick study sketches of this complicated ass mfer. I need to understand how to draw him so I can do a proper full painting.

😍

d r a g o n eeeeeeeeeeeee

Here have the last one i did right as my energy tanked because it makes my sides go wheeze:

David Hayward

* * * *

I continue, prattling on in the cemetery in the creeping dark. Here he is, after all—after all these years. I have a shawl wrapped around me and a streetlight nearby turns on. “I dried up after fifteen books,” I tell him. “One came after the other, crowded to get in line. Then nothing but the empty days on the portal and Covid burning up the sidewalks. My last book was about haiku.” I quickly drop that subject, afraid Hemingway didn’t care about haiku. I’m sure I repeated myself. Finally, I unwind as much as I can, and then there is nothing. But it is dumb clear, even with no revelation—it comes from me, not him: Write anyway. No ecstatic understanding. No big epiphany.

What did you think? I ask myself. You went to a writer for help. I was ignorant of a writer’s path when I was young and still hoped to escape, but I was married to it. Visiting Hemingway only drove that home. Like other marriages, you don’t know what you’re getting into until you stay and meet it, moment by moment. I think of the words of Suzuki Roshi, the Japanese Zen master, when someone asked him what enlightenment was: Seeing one thing through to the end. I guess that fit for anything you seriously take on.