💌 A Note from the Big Scary Future
a new painting // things are changing
In 2016, Danielle and I became the last people we knew to get smartphones.
This happened late that year, so when I joined the internet last week and went looking for photos from 2016 there were only a few. There’s one of Danielle wearing our biggest hat, eating.
There’s this one of my very first art supplies: shrink wrapped sketchbooks, a rainbow of sharpies, two calligraphy pens. I had just turned 30, trying out a brand new hobby.
And some blurry selfies, like this one of us with Little Lamb, a gift from our friend who was 3 years old at the time and now is in 7th grade and reads books faster than I do.
I had started a new PT job at a hospital earlier that fall. The morning after the election, two patients had to speak up over the celebratory Fox News they had playing in their rooms to make pointed comments to me, one about me “not being from here,” the other about how they were “against lesbians.” I drove home later, tired in a new way. Scared, too. I said to Danielle, “Things are changing.”
I was having panic attacks all the time back then. I was often awake deep into the night, chattering jaw, sick to my stomach. A friend recommended a yoga nidra track on YouTube, and now I had a smartphone to pull it up on. It started by asking you to set a sankalpa, or your deep desire stated in the present tense as though it were already true. I didn’t do it the first dozen times, suspicious of affirmations that seemed like lies, thinking also that there was nothing I wanted. And then, at last, I tried it; it came to me like a confession, so embarrassingly impossible that I kept it a secret: I am a full time artist and free from anxiety.
I began learning to paint and worked on landscapes for a couple of years. I was practicing atmospheric perspective, the effect made by all the air that piles up between us and objects in the far distance, turning them bluer and grayer. Mountains are daunting, monochromatic shapes at long distance; up close they are green and brown, wet and craggy, with small flowers, birds and bugs and paw prints.
I’m thinking of how, in 2016, everything I love now was still a blue mountain.
I painted this piece close to the New Year and have been carrying it around everywhere since, tucked in my notebook, holding a page in my novel, propped up on the paint jars on my desk. I am living in the future. My art is time traveling. It’s finding 2016-me, a note I spent all day painting in my very own art studio, telling my young self how I almost never have panic attacks anymore. A note to say: The future never comes all at once. It’s only ever now, now, now.
Keep going.
love,
brit
This painting is the New Art print reward for January Patreon members. If you’d like one, join a tier with a “New Art” print before the end of the month — there are two sizes, and the option for it to come with or without this month’s sticker.
❄️ The New Years Sale on annual Patreon memberships ends this month — this is your last chance to get almost 2 months free. It’s our only sale of the year. The discount is automatic when you select a yearly plan.
🎁 And, a reminder to all current (and new! 👋🏼) members that your holiday gift codes, the $10 shop credit and the BOGO, expire at the end of the month. Thank you for being part of this community. I hope you know how much we appreciate you. (Substack members can access the codes here, and Patreon members here.)
This new art is so moving. I adore it.