People usually imagine the most important moments in life in grand and somewhat predictable ways – the (un)expected putting on of a ring, cutting the umbilical cord, walking down the aisle to the altar. I don’t argue. Those moments are grand. But in retrospect, I am always fascinated by decisions, seemingly ordinary at first glance, whose significance may only become apparent years later. I enjoy their simplicity, apparent unimportance, and imperfection, or even absurdity.
As if Matkin (Slovak writer) once wrote:
"The most important things happen in the apartments, cars, and heads of the people involved."
I've had a certain idea in my head for a long time. So, one February morning it was time to involve our apartment in my not-so-practical decisions 😀(The car itself, for now, has to wait for its big moment 😀)
I woke up with the feeling that TODAY was the day.
I spread out on the floor in the kitchen. Several pieces of canvas on a frame, a bunch of acrylic paints of different brands. I had no idea what I was going to do! Or why 😀 That several-month-old inner call was already so strong that it could not be ignored.
No, we don't have a huge country kitchen with a work kitchen table in the middle and a view of the garden. I knelt on a square meter of a flat, somewhere between the refrigerator, the dishwasher and at that moment a rather impractical entrance to the bathroom, where I needed to go every moment through all the mess on the floor. To this day, I don't understand how I managed to paint anything there at all.
This is how stories are created. In strange places, even in discomfort and in a kind of sweet ignorance of where it will lead. This is how mine was created. Turquoise. The obsession with this color clearly determined the direction my very first official collection of abstract paintings would take, which was called, of course, "Turquoise Story".
I painted them knowing that maybe someone would come across them and like them. If they sold, wow, bonus. I thought, naively 😊, that all I had to do was open an e-shop on the biggest hand-made portal in the country and somehow the whole thing would, you know, "work itself out" 😀I'm smiling because it's been almost 3 years and so much has changed since then.
If you had told me back then that nobody just stumbles upon anything 😀 and that the times demand serious consistent marketing from you, my artistic soul would have been tempted to give up on it before all the layers on the painting were dry (acrylic dries soooo fast 😀).
And if you told me that those carefully prepared photos would soon be useless to me anyway and I would Have to shoot videos, I would send you... well, I know exactly where.
There are a lot of funny "unimportant" stories every day, because I believe that it is natural for a person to listen to their inner calling. Despite the noisy, loud, fast and sometimes really superficial time. Hey, you have to learn it, not to let yourself be distracted.
Just try it. What you have been putting off for so long, if it calls you. Maybe it will become a funny story for future generations (I also started going to Latino once and it was a complete fail 😀) or "just" the beginning of a new hobby. And maybe one day it will enlighten you so strongly that you will be spewing digital products from a cafe somewhere in Honolulu 😀
My collection was sold in its entirety and flew away to live its life somewhere outside our apartment building. If it weren't for that day, I probably wouldn't be starting a website or blog today, and who knows if I would ever start painting "real".
They say that occasionally, "that" door opens for you, and you can't do anything better than walk through it. I know, it doesn't always take the form of a photocell door where you don't even notice how smoothly you've moved on. Sometimes it's more like an action-packed shooting at a chain lock 😀 Anyway, don't miss it.
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-Elle-