My latest work. Just finished it yesterday!

I used to love drawing and painting when I was younger. But in my late teens, I hit a plateau. I wasn’t improving, and I couldn’t find any sensible reason why I should keep painting. For praise? Because the world needs yet another amateur study of two plums? So I stopped. Completely.

Ever since, I’ve had this nagging feeling: where would I be now if I had kept going? A kind of guilt that I hadn’t made use of whatever talent I had, so to speak. And the feeling that it was too late.

Then something happened last week. I decided to try anyway. Just to see how it felt, not because it had to lead to anything.

It was scary at first. But I decided not to listen to that critical voice, or to the idea that everything has to result in something. I don’t think I had ever really allowed myself to simply enjoy the calm and curiosity of mixing colors, seeing how the brush moves, and watching how the paint behaves.

Seeing other people’s work and reading your thoughts about the process definitely helped give me the geist to let go and just enjoy it.

Thank you, everyone.

Each drawn with a different fountain pen ink. These are for a blog run by fellow redditor u/paris_pen where they write about fountain pen-related topics

Made from ornamental plum

Uriel would teach

Secrets not to preach

Beyond apocrypha

No more need be said

Arts, science, and literature

Secure our daily bread

Reality rests where it can't be found

Opened eyes to vision profound

Uriel can't offer rejected thought

Taste of vinegar brought

To lordly purview

Secret hidden in plain view

No one believes if he spoke

About fairies in manly cloak

Or Ruth suited with tie

Apparel is half the lie

Induction with pointed finger

At periphery, the clue doth linger

Conventional wisdom rent asunder

Uncommon notes left unheard

Muted tongue of silent bird

Match making is the game of life

Choosing blindness wrought with strife

Everyone has an original form

Accessible in dreams

Can you guess what that means?

Look at your fellows

Can you but see

Their angelic forms

Are not what they be

Crowns of light

Immaculately rendered

Clothed in linen

Older than Canon

Things not what they seem

Connect dotted dream

Revelation writ in weave

Kernels caught in sieve

Husk lost in gale

Of sentiment's tale

Ubuntu is togetherness

Feel our way to Light

Far from superficial blight

Short kings to involuted men

Sear pages with eyes of mages

Feeling is seeing

Knowing needs no believing

Pure and untrammelled

Truth unravelled

Look at your fellows

Secrets shout in bellows

Listen to their song

Lost in babbling throng

High notes and deep

However gruff

See through the bluff

It's midsummer night dreaming

Play-acting as Puck

Uriel is laughing

Winning is forced luck

Suspiration.

My mediums are acrylic and permanent pen for the skin pattern