free form

Today I will start the day by drawing, the drawing will start! you hear? My body will curl itself over the table in the most non-ergonomic way as possible, I will stop breathing, I will float into space until my body aches terribly.

It's awkward for me to be a person who draws, I never felt at ease with the work. It's sometimes painful, and I have this old drawing injury in my left shoulder from the last months of Stilstand, that very easily returns if I don't take proper care of myself. And the self-loathing meanwhile, oooh, don't get me started.

My skillful, brilliant collaborator, Llaura McGee from Dreamfeel, asks me to be free in my storyboard, sketches, moods, poems. It's easier to piece together, if the form is free. Also, I am not paid properly to do this: There's no pressure. It's not a hobby, though. This is actually something that I want. 

Coming from more fixed ways to work, where every word counts, where every part of the process is carefully planned, and your abstract ideas needs to find a shape and goal quite quickly, so writing doesn't become the bottleneck, this kind of process I always dreamed off. 

I have every reason to stop doubting myself. 

****

So where will I start today?
TODAY was the day, beyond other days. Right?

It is easter. My daughter only wants to watch television about eggs. The daycare is closed.
Meanwhile I experience the past 35 easters within my system at the same time. I wonder if time really is relative. Most of all I want to sleep. Most of all I want to write and draw.

I work part time in my local church as a church waiter. After working there for a year, I have now been given the big responsibility to handle easter Sunday. The pressure is on. Jesus is returning!
I will clean the church.
I will make sure the flowers are standing beautifully and tall.
I will be the perfect church waiter in a crisp white shirt and black suit, hair tied back in the neck, singing the verses low from the back of the church. Here, I am first and foremost a mother, a wife, a waiter. A generous smile in a fixed form with fixed rules that repeats themselves year after year the past 2000 years

Now, at the café where I have two hours to intensively work work work, I have no clue what I am, I can be whatever, I am nothing and everything.
A free form,

*****

This is the drawing from today. Free, but carefully planned. A hole presents itself. 

Mother Earth in bathtub (or womb?). Ida Hartmann, 2025