This is the finished pencil art for a new drawing I’m calling Amidst Reverie and Doubt. Without question, I had more inspiration to make this than anything I've created before, and I believe that motivation helped me push myself in some new and gratifying ways.
I'll get into more detail about the imagery and symbolism of this one when I share the finished color art, but for now I'll just say it involves a multi-layered relationship with a special person in my life and our combined efforts to navigate a somewhat complex connection with one another.
In terms of the art itself, there are a lot of things happening here that are either new or just different than what I've been making with my dark surrealism over the past three years. For one thing, I've been wanting to incorporate more high fantasy themes as well as elements of nature and animals. The nature aspect has been growing steadily across recent pieces, especially with Moments After the End, which I shared the line art for in this post from June, but here on Amidst Reverie and Doubt I feel it's really begun to integrate itself into the cyber-industrial stuff in a more cohesive way.
Side note: I've tried to understand the role of nature vs. machinery in my drawings and what those things represent for me emotionally. Reflecting on the art I've made over the past three years, I believe the tubes, wires, and machinery come from a feeling of being consumed by thoughts, doubts, and fears, while nature elements reflect a willingness on my part to let go of outcomes, enjoy life in the moment, and trust a universal energy to guide me. (Side note to the side note: I literally had clarity on this just now while working on this post, so I'll have to return to this idea and expand on it more in the future.)
I also included some design elements in this drawing with the ribbon-like borders and the frame on the outer edge that are different from other recent creations. I briefly dabbled with some of that in 2021 on a couple smaller drawings I was doing for Inktober, but it's new to this type of dense, surrealist art.
Here's one of those Inktober drawings for reference:
As I was working on Amidst Reverie and Doubt, I had an obvious-but-always-fascinating observation about aging and brain plasticity. Specifically, our level of patience, skill, and discipline for any kind of task can be increased tremendously over time, and when embraced, this fact makes aging a sort of superpower.
Until just a few years ago, I had a terrible habit of jumping ahead of myself in the three-step process of my pencil drawings (rough sketch, outline, final drawing) and it always came back to haunt me.
My pencil art begins with a loose sketch using a 2H wooden pencil, and that initial drawing includes a lot of non-specific circles and lines to help me shape the composition before I decide what each element will be (ie a piece of machinery, an imp, etc.). It's really just a fast, rough drawing to get the core pieces in place. In the second step, I move to a complete outline of the drawing where I shore up the composition, clarify what each object and figure is, and work out the essential details. I don't have a great image of it, but for Amidst Reverie and Doubt, this is what the final outline looked like.
The third and final step of the process is to take a few mechanical pencils of varying lead sizes, all HB lead, and go back over the image to hammer out the shading, hatching, and fine details to get the final drawing.
On all the work I've done since I started this series of dark fantasy art back on Symbiotic, that three-step process has been a rigid and distinct one where I never jump ahead. But that's a fairly recent phenomenon, as I used to always jump ahead, either working on the outline before the initial rough composition was sorted out or else diving into shading before the outline was complete. Either way, I'd find myself in a spot where something looked odd or was just slightly in the wrong place and it was a chore to try to re-draw it because it meant wiping away a bunch of work I'd already done.
A drawing like Amidst Reverie and Doubt that has a lot of small objects interacting with each other would've overwhelmed me because I just didn't have the patience to follow the process. I never would've been able to get this many pieces to line up.
When I started Symbiotic in 2021 I promised I would give myself 10 years to "git gud" at making this kind of art before I worried too much about marketing or earning money from it. I'm three years into that 10-year plan, and I'm encouraged by the changes I've seen in my patience and discipline as well as my overall drawing skills. Here's hoping I can keep that trajectory going over the next seven years.
As usual with these work-in-progress posts, I want to shift away from a specific image to share some recent life experiences that are shaping and informing the art I make and how I make it. Earlier in this post I suggested that the increase in patience and discipline for my creative process was due to having a consistent practice (usually an hour every day, often more than that on my days off from work), and while that's certainly true, there's something else I believe has been a major contributor.
I've written in the past about my exploration of meditation as well as an ego death experience that happened late last year following some hospital visits. (I talked about the latter in detail in this post from May.) Through those experiences I've come closer to recognizing and embracing a sense of awareness around my experiences in life without interference from the thinky-thinky parts of my brain.
I recently felt a shift in that ability and find I am now able to drop back at nearly any moment of my day and simply observe myself and my surroundings with complete clarity, almost as if I'm seeing myself from a third-person perspective. When this happens, it's like a veil around the world melts away and I'm left with nothing but raw sensation. I often compare this to being a four-legged animal who's free from the blessing and curse of a robust prefrontal cortex, and I imagine myself simply sitting in a grassy savannah gazing out at the world and feeling the wind on my face without a single thought in my head.
This recent shift came as a result of the writings of the late, great Wayne Dyer (which will not shock you if you've followed this blog for any amount of time.) Specifically, I've had the audiobook version of Your Sacred Self on repeat for two or three months now, and I'll often listen for 15-20 minutes on my drive to work each day. I simply pick up where I left off, and it's astounding to me how often I drop into a piece of advice or wisdom from him that's exactly what I need to hear that day.
On a recent afternoon, I was feeling particularly wound up in thoughts about the person who inspired the art for Amidst Reverie and Doubt and was finding it very hard to relax and find mental peace. Late in the second chapter of Your Sacred Self Wayne dives into some thoughts on cultivating the witness, which involves removing our ego from our experiences and simply observing what's happening in that moment from the place of our higher spiritual self.
Unlike a lot of meditation/mindfulness practices that suggest observing without judgment, Wayne recommends entering this process with a sense of compassion, and something about that just clicked for me that day and I was able to instantly become a compassionate witness to my thoughts, feelings, and actions, something I've mercifully been able to continue each day since then.
I have a pair of reflections on this: the first is that everything in our life offers an opportunity for growth and increased life satisfaction. The complex situation with the woman I've mentioned has been challenging for me (and maybe just as much for her), but the excitement and tension and distraction of that connection has given me urgency in seeking an inner solution. The increased effort to let go of worry and doubt has now brought me to a place where I'm able to much more easily remove myself from the overthinking that I'm prone to in life, particularly around challenging personal relationships.
The other reflection involves some of my previous, possibly incorrect conclusions about the nature of these moments of mental stillness. In my Vipassana practice, as well as the ego death experience I felt after leaving the ER, I have occasionally been able to fully arrive at my seat of consciousness and discover that there is no Preston there at all. That my sense of self is an illusion. I have suggested before that in those moments there was no one there, simply awareness.
But I no longer quite believe that's accurate...
Instead, I'm increasingly convinced of two things. First, there actually is something there. God, Source, The Witness. Whatever its name, there really does seem to be some sort of presence there with me. It also feels significant to me that looking for a compassionate witness to my life enables me to find that state of awareness much faster and more clearly than when I simply try to step outside my ego.
Second (and this relates directly to my thoughts and concerns around the possibility that humans have no free will), my true self – whatever combination of emotions and motivations and behaviors that I understand to be Preston – actually exists more fully in those moments of stillness. It's not that I'm gone, it's just that I've previously been so identified with the incessant chatter of my ego that I couldn't recognize my true spiritual self when I found it.
In the blissful moments when I'm able to quiet my mind, I find I'm able to live more authentically with far less of the people-pleasing, self-doubt, and other limiting behaviors that have affected me in life. Everything (including my art process!) becomes simpler and more efficient when I'm able to act without thinking, and I'm able to connect with others in a way my past self never could.
Of course, none of this is to say I'm some kind of enlightened person or master meditator. Not even close. My head is still a mess most of the time and it's a daily struggle to be present and keep my mind and heart open to the world. But similar to my feelings about my increased patience and skill level with my art, it's encouraging to see that years of steady meditation and mindfulness continue to yield a sense of peace and contentment in life, regardless of what struggles I may be moving through.
At the very least, I know I'm farther down that road than I was a couple years ago, and that's enough motivation to keep going.
That's all for this month. I fell off the blog for a minute because my laptop had grown old and slow, but I'm on a new laptop and back in my routine of writing at a coffee shop on my days off. I have a ton of art updates to share and so I should be back to a semi-regular monthly schedule here.
As always, thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, subscribe to email notifications and consider sharing this with a like-minded friend or family member. Cheers until next time!
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