yoga and acid trips

Dude. I’m, like, LIVING in Italy right now. Like, found-an-Italian-yoga-studio-and-signed-up-for-3-months living in Italy. This is crazy business.

It's amazing, I want so much to hate painting and have an excuse to quit cause it's so goddamn impractical and time-consuming and so many bad things, but the days when I really get to sit and paint for a good three hours, I come away feeling SO good. So happy and fulfilled. Today I didn’t even have class, but I did my homework, which was to do a self-portrait (AGAIN. semi-ugh), and had some sort of color epiphany. In class right now she's having us really focus on exploring reflected color and the wide variations of hue within any given tone (i.e. in a simple white shirt, there can be bright pink and hot yellow in the highlights and dark purple and green in the shadows but as long as they are the right tone, it will read as a white shirt), and this is something I had always KNOWN, and like SORT OF utilized in my work, but for some reason when I was sitting in the studio today and started methodically laying out my lights and darks like I always do in what could only be described as “skin color”, I suddenly looked again at my face in the mirror and saw this giant green shadow across my cheek. And the bridge of my nose was hot orange from the bright light. And the highlights in my hair were pure white – but underneath it was orange and green. it was SO WEIRD. So I just put it all on the canvas and it was so exhilirating and I -GASP- only did half of my hair and only a swipe of background and didn’t even TOUCH my clothing, which, if you know ANYTHING about how I paint you will know that I am a chronic “finisher” and this is SUPER out-of-the-ordinary. I was just so into the fact that I could put purple on my collarbone and it would still look like a collarbone...

And as I’m saying this, I’m sure you are all imagining this acid-trip looking, wacky Van-Gogh-esque self-portrait, but alas, it pretty much looks like any other self-portrait I've done. But it's about the process, man...

So anyway, yoga: while the class itself was awesome, the best part about it was that it was taught entirely in Italian but I still totally got it. AND the studio is like two blocks away from my house. It just made me feel so local... in addition to all the great things that yoga makes me feel that are too hard to describe. So, all in all, a good day.