Wednesday, January 1, 2014
"A New Beginning"
1:50pm

What a year 2013 was! It brought lots of change. We moved, settled in nicely, and I returned to artwork and study. Then came October! What a fateful rest of the year! A careless poke of my ear drum brought a great deal of pain. Two unsuccessful doctor visits until I found one with good equipment and knowledge. He gently suctioned out a ton of wax and I was surprised to again be able to hear.

However, another problem started up before that doctor visit, which came on me December 7th, in the evening on a Saturday. I did not want to go to an urgent care clinic. It had felt just like the strep throat I'd had in my twenties. So I took some Mexican penicillin for it. After the ten days of that, however, my troubles worsened. Not able to get an appointment, the advice was to resume the penicillin. BUT IT WASN'T DOING ANY GOOD!

Back again to the good doctor! He suggested that perhaps the cause was not bacterial but VIRAL, in which case penicillin is useless. Perhaps it was something nasty like Epstein Barr 'mono' virus, which usually lasts three weeks?

Looking back on the ups and downs, I realized I had felt better whenever I'd had a chance to rest, for instance on Sundays, lying on the couch and reading or listening to music. When ever I'd felt most wretched was after a long work week and overtime. Perhaps the truly curative thing was rest and fluids. So I quit the penicillin and aimed to get more rest.

By December 28th, three weeks!, I finally felt I'd vanquished the bug. Still a little weary, but that will pass in time.

As true measure of well being, after a long month, I'm again at last in the mood to do art. My nice, thick 2013 sketchbook is flowing overinto 2014! So I've created an initial drawing for the new year:


Ink pen and colored pencil on acid free paper, 17.8 x 25.3 cm (7 x 10 in.),
Spiral rings removed after the scan, and neatened up a bit digitally:

I've taken the example of personified ankh holding the feather of Ma'at, (who represents truth, justice and balance) from the one at the Ramesseum, photo by Hans Kontkanen, and flipped it to get a symmetrical view. (And, yes, I suppose I could of written the year number using hieroglyphs, but the year number is not one the ancient Egyptians would have recognized. Perhaps 'year six of the reign of Obama', except that he's not that sort of ruler, and....) So viola, the 'Roman' numerals!

I liked the colors of my first adaptation of this, which I'd colored digitally, and which later went into the creation of a mandala.


Ma'at Mandala


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