Everyone has doubts. I have doubts about whether my apartment will ever stop being messy, and also why I crave messiness even as I clean it up. I have doubts about where I live and work. I doubt whether my hedgehog will get nicer and stop biting me. Doubt is a condition we all live with. I remember feeling doubt even as a child, but not knowing how to express it, or even what I was doubting.
The funny thing is that doubt is hard to talk about. The outside world asks us to present absolute confidence and perfection in ourselves and work. The sad thing is that every single one of us 7 billion people living now, at some point, will lie in bed or staring out the window, doubting something.
Right now I am taking a botanical painting class. I want to be able to get better at drawing plants, especially medicinal plants. Every fruit and vegetable from the store has almost infinite variety when I take enough time to stare at them! Even the big box stores that sell mono culture tomatoes, each of those tomatoes is complex...stems face one way, or the other way. Some don't have stems. Factory farming cannot prevent nature's variety.
I drew this small piece of a banana quite awhile ago. I think I might have cut this banana like this for my other pet hedgehog, Pineapple, who is now dead. To a hedgehog this would have been a lot of banana!
One of my favorite quotes about art and doubt is one that I can no longer find. I remember reading that Caravaggio said that he paints doubt. When I look into the eyes of some of Caravaggio's figures, I can see the doubt, and it is beautiful. I wish we could be that frank with each other more often.
