there's gold in them thar hills

Sometimes you think you know what you want, and then you pursue it tirelessly. Was it the pursuit that drove you or the destination? When you finally get what you think you wanted, is it worth piping the vast amounts of energy into it?

You dig, and dig, and dig. When there’s no further left to go, the way back out can seem steep.

I’ve been at my new job for about a month, leaving my almost 20 year career of cooking for, so that could have some semblance of a “normal” life. Part of the reason I made this change was to also have time to pursue my art, and now that I did the hard part of essentially giving up a huge part of my identity, insanely finding something that my skills transferred to, but now I have hardly painted at all.

I wanted to paint something that showed transitions through time, and if you’ve ever hiked around the NWPA region, we have loads of slate. Layers and layers of slate with fossilized bivalves and ferns abound. It’s a stark visual of the passage of time walking down a creek with walls of slate going up a hundred feet above your head towards the sky. In the painting, the tiny person dug themselves down through so many layers of time. By the time they found the gold in the bottom, its been how long?

Again, thank you for listening to my art/emotional health rants.

Have a heckin super day <3