Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Feeling my way....

 After Rain
6x6; oil on panel

Filtered Sky
6x6; oil on panel

....a second day back at the easel and some things are getting more familiar; some not so much.

 I went through a very similar experience last summer when I picked up my horn for the first time in four years. I had been writing and recording music, just not playing any on saxophone (which is actually my main instrument). Armed with the crazy notion that I might go back to school, I scheduled an audition for the music department two weeks out......and off I went to the practice room....

What followed was two weeks of the most humbling, frustrating, and painful hours/days in recent memory -- and that includes recovery from emergency abdominal surgery :) My beloved 1959 Selmer saxophone -- my first true love -- felt like a foreign object. As the days progressed, ideas and technique that became more clearly remembered in my mind were simply not in my hands any longer. I would go to play something I heard very distinctly in my head and my fingers could not make the connection -- the muscle memory was gone.....or at least, very much asleep.....more to this story later....

....so here I am again, returning to something that I haven't done for quite some time and feeling like I'm staring at the bottom of a very large mountain -- fortunately, I believe I know the path up a little better this time.

Still, it will be an interesting journey

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