Lets get out of the woods.

What a year! or half a year, to be precise.

This isn't going to be very pretty I'm afraid.

I've been thinking a lot about what sort of path I want to take next year, art work wise. What happened in the last 3 and a bit months has obviously had an impact on me that was beyond my control. And at the moment I'm becoming quite an annoyance to myself. Quite often and usually without realising it, I find myself losing my head; I spend countless minutes, hours and days reminding myself of what was, and what so easily could have been.
If it wasn't for the art of communication (or in this case, severe lack of) I could have lost my best and most beautiful friend. Thinking about it, my dad really did save my mum's life. It's crazy to think that without her influence on his, he may never have pushed and fought as hard as he did, he may have sat back and put all his faith in the doctors, and who could blame him if he had?

Yesterday, mum came up to me with this recorded message she'd done for my gran a few christmases ago that she'd found in one of our many drawers full of useless shit. 'ooh, wouldn't it have been dead spooky if you found this and I'd died?'
...great, yeah, dead spooky.

In my head, the bad always seems to override the good. I said to mum a few weeks ago, with absolutely no offense intended, that I was surprised how quickly I lost all hope when she was severely ill, not that I didn't want her to live(!) but afterwards I shocked myself with all the terribly selfish thoughts that went through my head on the 9th, 10th and 11th of April. I don't think I ever spoke to anyone about that, a little bit out of shame I guess, it was just me preparing myself for how I was going to carry on when she wasn't here anymore. Grief had just completely taken over.

Despite the new found love, appreciation and admiration I have for almost everyone and everything, I can say this, and for once in my life I can be sure to say it with confidence - I will never be able to fully absorb the feeling and realisation that absolute unprecedented fear had set in, and still hasn't quite gone away.

Normally, I would take great pleasure in the thought that someone had used their family tragedy as a stage in which to create a colourful masterpiece clouded with ambiguity and most importantly, a good old batch of pain.
I feel it would be ever so hypocritical of me to set my own stage in motion, but in the end, does it really fucking matter? The be all and end all is - I need a project, I need some sort of emotional release and really, I'm exploiting nothing and no-one but myself.

There are a million and one things I wish I could paint about, mostly my issues (hahah) with myself, but I've just no idea where to start.

I've hit a wall, and I need to knock it down!