To go with her song:

Billions of photons tumble from the sky
Just for you, drop that sparkle in your eye
Collect up the beads of gold in your woven basket
Save them for a rainy day and let the sunshine pour

Chorus:
Remember that day in February
We hailed a black cab and sialed on our way
You pulled me close to your chest and whispered in my ear
“I’m gonna love you until the end of time”

You’ll carry my burdens and I’ll hold your hand
We’ll picnic in the park and on the beachy sands
We’ll sit as a pair in the dusky night
The two of us as one, under the silvery moonlight

And so our story, it continues
The chapters up to ten are done
But Babe, what a way to start a novel
A book I never could put down

-Lizzie Ayling

for Marta.

Super rough, but it makes me giggle. This was for Cara’s suggestion of something out of place. No more sicky, so back to trying for one a day.

(click for larger image)

And as an added treat, a second interpretation of it by Cara:

I finished this one yesterday:

As assigned by kate.

And this tonight:

A portrait of Hayley, as per her request.

More to come. And I’m still taking requests.

When I came back the next week, at 2:30 once again, the clock claimed it was 4:25, still on wednesday, the ninth. The second hand though, hadn’t moved from it’s spot between 36 and 37, and still jumped lightly on the ticks and forcefully on the tocks…. Why do I find this interesting? God only fucking knows. But I spent the whole of that class watching the clock again, trying to catch the minute hands in action, to no avail. THIS is what I waste MY time doing, watching clocks that move without moving, trying to catch them in the act.

I was back in that room again today. It said it was 5:40, still wednesday, still the ninth. Although, the wednesday is only half visible now, which makes me suspect that next week it may finally be thursday. The room is obviously stuck in some sort of time warp where, conceivably, life is moving at a much slower pace. Today I started musing about what wednesday of what month of what year it was that I was visiting while I sat in the room. My teacher asked why I was smiling, and I quickly made an excuse and a mental note to control my facial expressions for the rest of class.

“When Thomas Mann was very young, he wrote a naïve, intriguing story about death. In the story death is beautiful, as it is beautiful to those who dream of it very young, when it is still surreal and enchanting, like the bluish voice of far-off places.

A young man, mortally ill, gets off a train at an unknown station. He walks into the town without knowing its name and takes rooms in the house of an old woman whose forehead is covered with eczema. No, I do not wish to go into what took place in the rented rooms. I only wish to recall a single minor occurrence: walking around the front room, the ill young man had the feeling that “in between the sounds made by his footsteps he heard another sound in the rooms on either side – a soft, clear, metallic tone – but perhaps it was only an illusion. Like a golden ring falling into a silver basin, he thought…”

That minor acoustic event is never developed or explained in the story. From the standpoint of the action above it could have been omitted without any loss. The sound simply happened; all by itself; just like that. The reason I think Thomas Mann sounded that “soft, clear, metallic tone” was to create silence, the silence he needed to make the beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was beauty-death), and if beauty is to be perceptible, it needs a certain minimal degree of silence (a perfect criterion of which happens to be the sound of a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

(Yes, I know. You haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about. Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise – the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music, the noise of signs – we live in it constantly. It has sunk as deep as Atlantis. The only thing left is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.)”

-Milan Kundera

I don’t know why, but I’ve never been the type who was able to really devote herself to making art. I mean, I graduate from art school excited to finally have some time on my hands to make things my way– and within a year I go and throw myself back into school to study in a field that (at this level at least) has nothing at all to do with art. So I’m stuck trying to divide my time between attempting to memorize cell anatomy and statistics formulas, and mixing paints… Even in art school I couldn’t just settle into a life of drawing and painting classes, I had to stuff my schedule with HTML and ActionScript, or random ass architecture classes just cause I get bored so easily and needed a challenge.

I like to think that some day I’ll figure out a way to synthesize the vast database of random knowledge that’s stored in my head at this point. Instead I mostly just feel useless for knowing a ton of shit that no one needs to know all at once and not being able to put almost any of it to use in real life.

Ok, rant over.