Drawing and energy

It’s weird and yet it’s not. When I’m tired, I tend to want to draw less detailed than when I’m feeling energized. Not that I can’t be both at the same time: at the end of a long working day I’m really tired, but my mind is still racing – I unwind it by drawing a precise portrait or something like that. However, these last few days I was just exhausted.

Yesterday my holiday finally started. The day before at work was quite busy and stressful, of course, and yesterday I entered relaxation mode, immediately falling through into the dungeons of exhausted-cannot-think mode. The annoying thing about that is that you are free, you want to do fun things like reading a book, draw a little, maybe do some shopping, but that your brain basically says “Nope!” to every proposal you make. I had one thing to do yesterday: have a rehearsal with a lute player to prepare a concert, and I was just not able to read or do anything in the train and tram on my way there. I just couldn’t do it.

That would not be a problem if you had already come into that nice deep relaxation which comes with having a vacation, but on the first day of the holiday you are both exhausted and still in active mode (you constantly have the feeling that you need to do something useful, or at least something nice for yourself). I usually experience that during the first couple of days of my holidays, so this time I was not really stressing about it, but it still annoyed me a bit.

So I tried to just give in to the fatigue, and not expect myself to either do something useful or magically heal from it in one day by properly and intensely relaxing (haha – got you there, usefulness-but-stress-in-disguise!), and in the end I even managed to draw a little in the evening. With pastels, not pencils, though, because I didn’t have the energy for subtlety and intricateness, I just wanted to play with colours, atmosphere and shapes. It was very satisfying, and I managed to not be overly critical of the work, and just enjoy the process. Ka-ching! I might revisit it later, though, and play with it a bit more.