I keep long, late hours. I tend to wake up in a sour mood if I feel that I hadn’t made the most of my available time outside of work the evening prior, so if I’m overtired by the end of the week, the choice is most often wholly my own and I accept full responsibility.
Something that’s only recently occurred to me is that a natural side effect for keeping such long hours with what amount to be a constant rotation of various client-based or self-initiated projects, is that that funny, buzzy feeling of overstimulation sustains itself a little bit more than l’d prefer. Short of horse tranquilizers or a Buddhist-for-hire, the ability to dial the brain down before I go to bed is a bit of a challenge.
To combat this, I’ve begun closing the days out by digging up earlier sketchbook drawings I’ve done and reworking them without any thematic motive or intent. It’s a narrative free, subtext free, meaning free excuse to play with a picture and explore all of my idiotic, baseless impulses. The one above was a recent experiment by adding arbitrary bubbles of color around what was before just an ordinary drawing of someone’s head. I couldn’t explain the motivation to do that specifically to his head, but I did discover that it was extremely satisfying to wind the day down by playing around with something without the self-imposed pressure to ask yourself what, specifically, it means. Plus, I slept like the dead.
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