Swifaut (+Update on Insomnia)
(ALT: Digital painting. Left to Right: Firefighters in background, one crawling over debris carrying yellow-handled axe, foreground firefighter (anthro, kneeling, covered in gear and holding a lowered water hose in hesitation) faces open passage with fire-creature (fox, same character as the firefighter) reaching out to him. Top of the picture is smoke ceiling.)
For the upload before this one, I copy-pasted the description from Patreon. The one for this picture is even longer, publicly available here together with more picture material:
For the upload before this one, I copy-pasted the description from Patreon. The one for this picture is even longer, publicly available here together with more picture material:
http://301.nz/W7YPm
Months later, this picture stands out as the most tailored commission I've done. Still suspended in my current little health crisis, the mind likes to lay blame and beg to trade anything at all. The most infantile thought might have been that I maybe should stop making art and cut off most online contacts, so as to say, sacrifice the little I did manage to build, because I somehow built wrong (especially the porn and the digital tends to receive the most resentment), adapted wrongly to grief, that I am still a leech on a bigger leg (wading trough a very sad swamp), because the idea of utility in art - one of the foundations of why I ever began to make furry art - was a shield against the not improbable uselessness of my commission work (based on the high standard I had set) and my feeble attempts at Tarot education. For which I burned myself up. The herculean efforts, the attempts at aping my superiors (who were often little more than projection screens for my complexes), long chats often spent in vain, the hours of planning nobody could have paid me for, hinging on an incomplete and derailed education, a desire masking as resentment for academia and success. Naturally, when Swifaut, Ryke and others encourage me and inflate my ego, I can sustain another round of bloodletting, get another hit, feel a little more obligated, until a certain point, and that point, I believe, has been reached. So maybe, the infantile impulse of self-punishment has a kernel of truth, because some parts of one's personality simply have to die when their time has passed. And just to be clear, this has absolutely no bearing on my view of those people I worked for. Don't nobody come apologizing at me.
How noble the lone sufferer, eternal hermit-child of the starry desert, living only in the future, riding high on his unfulfilled potential. Only six, ten more books and I may finally have the wisdom I need to be a good artist! So I can make commissions that will finally help people instead of me being just another esoteric grifter using borrowed terminology! Maybe then I will feel recognized! Here's the rub, when, when ever, did I make even a fraction of all this effort just for myself? Once, twice? And both times the attempt was corrupted, I wanted my brand on it, wanted it to be shareable. So, zero times. I'm sorry, but my self-expression ought to have fuck all to do with what any part of me suggests you all might find interesting to see, or how it might be remembered when I'm dead, what influence it could have. (I appreciate Zelaphas' company name, "Abandon Ambition.") More importantly, how can that happen when I'm still running on the same conditioning all the time acting like I will crash and burn if I miss a con or my savings deplete. (To paraphrase Jung; to over-secure oneself is to drain oneself of the will to live.) So, to say it another way, I do think commissions fucked with me, because they provided the perfect diversion- after the perfect diversion of education, after the perfect diversion of adolescent fantasies and competitive Mario Kart Wii. The way forward demands real responsibility, action and integration, not simply correct professions of belief paired with stagnation. Where I think it came from is another topic.
Not to bore you, but I found this very interesting: Due to how the Unconscious functions, Jung saw neuroses as having symbolic character. It's not ok to self-analyse, but after trying almost every trick in the book of relaxation and CBT, with my medication (Daridorexant) making me feel like a hallucinating zombie that often still could not sleep, I admittedly was drawn to the idea that my insomnia was not merely a bodily issue ("anxiety"? Nah, I was perfectly calm most nights) but my Unconscious telling me to wake up, stop dreaming (hence maybe the urge to "give up my dream" as the illusion I was living) by paying attention to my dreams again, taking up contact. Just as consciousness and rationality particularized, intensified and differentiated me into a decently capable but, now, split human being working against itself, their sibling categories, being extensive, lacking definition and boundary, whisper the spiralling path to wholeness every day and night. But when the light is always on you can't see the stars, so, maybe there's some utility to being so indescribably exhausted all the time. The mental peak is slackened to a rounder hill. So far I really can't say I understand dreams super well, I did make some thorough attempts at analysis, but they're not professional. My only help is a nine hour interview series with Marie-Louise von Franz (Way of the Dream) and, more recently, Jung's 'Psychology and Alchemy.' What I do notice is a sense of being unable to continue, of being over-burdened with a bunch of useless shit, of having to progress but being unwilling to, in departments of fun, grief, exploration. There's a lot of injury-imagery in them too. If it needed this much pain for me to get to this point, I have no problem with it getting worse or continuing, even against my best efforts, until I have perceived the problem and undergone that change. Merry Katabasis-mas and a Happy New Year.
So really I haven't lost faith, this is just a necessary part of the process (and I'm not telling you quite everything, because that would be loads more.) As this picture says (endure and confront, do not flee your demons) I already had the tools, it's just time to use them. I hope the honest reflection here is not an inappropriate attention grab away from Swif. He's a lovely guy who this picture is very much about. He belongs to the few people who gave me no room to worry about whether my effort was ineffectual or ultimately meaningless, simply by being himself.
As they say,
Shit-n-Cum.
Theo
Months later, this picture stands out as the most tailored commission I've done. Still suspended in my current little health crisis, the mind likes to lay blame and beg to trade anything at all. The most infantile thought might have been that I maybe should stop making art and cut off most online contacts, so as to say, sacrifice the little I did manage to build, because I somehow built wrong (especially the porn and the digital tends to receive the most resentment), adapted wrongly to grief, that I am still a leech on a bigger leg (wading trough a very sad swamp), because the idea of utility in art - one of the foundations of why I ever began to make furry art - was a shield against the not improbable uselessness of my commission work (based on the high standard I had set) and my feeble attempts at Tarot education. For which I burned myself up. The herculean efforts, the attempts at aping my superiors (who were often little more than projection screens for my complexes), long chats often spent in vain, the hours of planning nobody could have paid me for, hinging on an incomplete and derailed education, a desire masking as resentment for academia and success. Naturally, when Swifaut, Ryke and others encourage me and inflate my ego, I can sustain another round of bloodletting, get another hit, feel a little more obligated, until a certain point, and that point, I believe, has been reached. So maybe, the infantile impulse of self-punishment has a kernel of truth, because some parts of one's personality simply have to die when their time has passed. And just to be clear, this has absolutely no bearing on my view of those people I worked for. Don't nobody come apologizing at me.
How noble the lone sufferer, eternal hermit-child of the starry desert, living only in the future, riding high on his unfulfilled potential. Only six, ten more books and I may finally have the wisdom I need to be a good artist! So I can make commissions that will finally help people instead of me being just another esoteric grifter using borrowed terminology! Maybe then I will feel recognized! Here's the rub, when, when ever, did I make even a fraction of all this effort just for myself? Once, twice? And both times the attempt was corrupted, I wanted my brand on it, wanted it to be shareable. So, zero times. I'm sorry, but my self-expression ought to have fuck all to do with what any part of me suggests you all might find interesting to see, or how it might be remembered when I'm dead, what influence it could have. (I appreciate Zelaphas' company name, "Abandon Ambition.") More importantly, how can that happen when I'm still running on the same conditioning all the time acting like I will crash and burn if I miss a con or my savings deplete. (To paraphrase Jung; to over-secure oneself is to drain oneself of the will to live.) So, to say it another way, I do think commissions fucked with me, because they provided the perfect diversion- after the perfect diversion of education, after the perfect diversion of adolescent fantasies and competitive Mario Kart Wii. The way forward demands real responsibility, action and integration, not simply correct professions of belief paired with stagnation. Where I think it came from is another topic.
Not to bore you, but I found this very interesting: Due to how the Unconscious functions, Jung saw neuroses as having symbolic character. It's not ok to self-analyse, but after trying almost every trick in the book of relaxation and CBT, with my medication (Daridorexant) making me feel like a hallucinating zombie that often still could not sleep, I admittedly was drawn to the idea that my insomnia was not merely a bodily issue ("anxiety"? Nah, I was perfectly calm most nights) but my Unconscious telling me to wake up, stop dreaming (hence maybe the urge to "give up my dream" as the illusion I was living) by paying attention to my dreams again, taking up contact. Just as consciousness and rationality particularized, intensified and differentiated me into a decently capable but, now, split human being working against itself, their sibling categories, being extensive, lacking definition and boundary, whisper the spiralling path to wholeness every day and night. But when the light is always on you can't see the stars, so, maybe there's some utility to being so indescribably exhausted all the time. The mental peak is slackened to a rounder hill. So far I really can't say I understand dreams super well, I did make some thorough attempts at analysis, but they're not professional. My only help is a nine hour interview series with Marie-Louise von Franz (Way of the Dream) and, more recently, Jung's 'Psychology and Alchemy.' What I do notice is a sense of being unable to continue, of being over-burdened with a bunch of useless shit, of having to progress but being unwilling to, in departments of fun, grief, exploration. There's a lot of injury-imagery in them too. If it needed this much pain for me to get to this point, I have no problem with it getting worse or continuing, even against my best efforts, until I have perceived the problem and undergone that change. Merry Katabasis-mas and a Happy New Year.
So really I haven't lost faith, this is just a necessary part of the process (and I'm not telling you quite everything, because that would be loads more.) As this picture says (endure and confront, do not flee your demons) I already had the tools, it's just time to use them. I hope the honest reflection here is not an inappropriate attention grab away from Swif. He's a lovely guy who this picture is very much about. He belongs to the few people who gave me no room to worry about whether my effort was ineffectual or ultimately meaningless, simply by being himself.
As they say,
Shit-n-Cum.
Theo
1 year ago
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