Chasm
Sunday, October 23, 2022
I’m not sure where my head was with this. All over the place, like usual, but no specific place.
I’m uncomfortable in my own home. Not for any bad reason. I’m not in danger or anything. It just doesn’t feel like me. To be fair, I didn’t argue or say anything when the boyfriend began putting up his “decor”. And I put that in quotations because his idea of decor are hundreds of FunkoPop dolls (I now hate those things with the fury of a thousand suns) and movie/music posters. I knew that was going to happen - the posters not the dolls - he had them in our old rental house. They’re framed, so it’s not like they’re thumbtacked like a college dorm. But then he kept adding. It’s to a point that most rooms in our house have more picture frames than wall space. That included the front room.
I’m never quite sure which is a “family” room and which is a “living” room, so I’ll just say the room without the TV. When we first moved in, I put up a lot of photos of the kids and family members so it was sort of a giant collage on the wall. Our house is two story, and the front room has a vaulted ceiling up to the ceiling of the second floor. That wall is huge and fit all of the photos. But here’s the thing… they haven’t been updated in 4 years. The only photos in our house that ever get changed are the three kids’ school photos.
I spend most of my time in the front room. It’s where my art desk is as well as my work desk. It’s got a big front window and my recliner with the massage chair overlay on it. And the photos became too much. So I rearranged. I took down all of the photos, took down art work that wasn’t my own. I replaced the art with my art, and simplified the photo wall. The boyfriend hates it.
Here’s the thing… I don’t care. I mean, I do, but I don’t. I can’t breathe in our bedroom because he has the walls covered, and I mean that literally, with music and movie posters. I have a small corner where my Nine Inch Nails framed concert posters are (there are two), the rest are his Pink Floyd, Tool, Grateful Dead, and anything David Lynch. It doesn’t feel like MY room. It feels like I’m sleeping over at my boyfriends house. The room with the TV has like 15 movie posters of different sizes. The hallway walls are covered in photos of the kids. The stairs landing is 49ers. Our kitchen has no walls, it’s all cabinets, except right about the sink where I have one sign that says “Mom’s Kitchen” and a clock, that’s it. On top of the fridge are 49ers gnomes (no, I’m not joking), and the fridge is covered in various magnets.
I needed a room. This is now my room. Yes, the photos will be of the 5 of us, mixed with his parents and brother, and my parents. But a lot less of them. The only artwork that I now have up that isn’t my own is a charcoal caricature drawing of me and my daughter from a street artist in Paris, and a painting from a different street artist in Paris. It goes with my work desk theme… you guessed it, Paris.
So, when I sat down to paint, after a day spent cleaning and getting the photos ordered for the new frames, I wasn’t thinking about art at all. My head was all over the place. I grabbed my texture paint, but didn’t want to paint the whole canvas, so I made three sections. Then that reminded me of a river, so I paint poured blues and whites. Then painted the texture areas green. It looked too much like a field with streams, so I added the brown banks, then purple. Because who doesn’t like purple? It was still missing something, so I added the neon green lines. Then added a thick layer of gloss sealer to the blue and purple (with a little glitter mixed in) and matte sealer to the green. Once that dried, I decided it was missing something, so I added the neon pink and orange lines.
The texture on this thing is crazy and I don’t think translate-able to prints. It’s more of a “you have to see it in person” kind of painting. I think it looks cool. Almost like a chasm has opened up in the earth. Or maybe my brain.