"Simply Understanding" - oil on Yupo, 19.5 x 24.5.  Available here, at Artfinder and at Bluethumb.


​What’s one area of your life that you keep trying to “solve” instead of simply understanding? This doesn’t have to necessarily be a relationship either. People try to “solve” their health problems with fad diets, when often they first need to develop an awareness of the emotions that enable the problems in the first place. 

In my own life, I’ve often tried to “solve” my creativity by over-planning books and projects, when really I just needed to sit down and create and understand what I was feeling. - MARK MANSON

Here in the studio,  the love affair with pink continues.  This time bouncing off the pink in an abstractscape form.

And Manson's words arrived in my in-box right on time - I am a "solver" - I throw my efforts at solving things before I even truly understand them.  In my creative life, yes, but also in my regular life and in relationships.  Trying to solve something feels active, empowered, strong.  Trying to sit with it and feel it feels risky, vulnerable, exposed, naked.

Manson encourages us to listen to others more instead of attempting to provide solutions, but also (and more importantly) to listen to ourselves.  To not fix, to not push away, to just feel it and understand why it is there in the first place.

And so I practice this in the paint, hoping it will ooze out into the rest of my world. 

How about you, dear reader?  Are you a solver?  Or do you sit with and understand things? Leave a comment below.  One lucky reader will win a small original piece of art, just for being vulnerable.  Yay!