A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Work In Progress



Most of the work that I've been doing has taken me a day or two to do, but this one is going to take longer.  I worked on this for an hour or so changing the girl on the left's face and trying to get a likeness for the mother's face, which I didn't succeed at doing.  The proportions may be wrong now and the figure on the side of the painting I'm not sure if I can fit.  It needs a lot of work and that's what I've been wanting lately, a challenge.  Well I've got it.  But I know when I say to myself to stop painting, I should listen and put it aside, which I'm doing now.  I had an excellent teacher in the 1980s who put out a book on painting and in her book she said that it was a good idea to work on several different projects at the same general time, so I have to look for something else to concentrate on....

Monday, March 6, 2017

Mother, Daughters & A Friend





Just started this painting yesterday with a charcoal drawing and with the oil paint today.  The girl on the left side does not look the way I want her to look based on the reference photo I'm using.  Her face and the color of her jacket will change, but I like the contrast between the two girls' expressions right now and I'd like to see the transformation, which is why I've taken pictures as I progress through the process of painting.