Daily Painting = Daily Changes

Distractions change the journey - the direction shifts and the journey evolves.  On the 8th day of my challenge I bought a beautiful bouquet of lilies.  I thought I would paint one flower from the bouquet each day until they were all dead.  The first day, as much as I liked painting the flower, I wasn't happy with the result so I wiped it off.  The next day I decided to paint the whole bouquet.

I have a tremor that makes fine detail work difficult.  My mahl stick doesn't help because the shaking is in my fingers.  It's a distraction.  As difficult as it is, I keep going and after the second day this was the result.  I see the shaking from my fingers in the attempts to get the detail of the flowers.  But for some reason, I like it.  At least I like it enough to share it here.

I've had the tremor for quite awhile and my neurologist believes that it is probably due to genetics and not the tumor.  I agree with her since my mother had tremors.  They used to be occasional but have become more noticeable when I paint so I googled "painting with tremors."  I'm not alone.  There are a few things I can try but they aren't going to go away & I'm not sure I want to increase any of my medications. 

I've always liked painting fine detail - mostly because I could.  Getting the details in an eye or flower was challenging and I was proud of my ability to pull it off, but it isn't something that drives my creative energy.  There are worse things & hell, I survived a brain infection so I'm not going to let a tremor get in the way of my creativity.  I let the painting sit for a couple of days & did a little touch up.  I still like it so I took it to my photographer yesterday to get a better pic.

Tomorrow I'm going to paint in spite of the tremor & instead of trying so hard to control & correct it, we'll just see what happens.  Stay tuned............. :)

In my search about Essential Tremors I found a very interesting TED talk:
           Embrace the Shake by Phil Hansen

Thank you for your time!