“This is an interesting spot for Samantha, taking her medication without breakfast. That could mean serious tummy trouble for her. What do you make of this play, coming from a top-level player like her?”
“She’s saying to her executive dysfunction, ‘okay, I’m creating a crisis, now you respond.’ Executive dysfunction has done a good job here of making getting up to eat impossible, but now she has to, fast, in order to avoid tummy trouble.”
“And now executive dysfunction is actually the one on the back foot, because she has the upper hand in time pressure situations.”
“That’s exactly right. As an ADD main, she’s playing to her strengths rather than her weaknesses, bringing tasks into close range where she has that powerful short-term attention span to deal with them, rather than trying to fight them in the future where she can’t hit them.”
I’m a huge fan of your account. Gorgeous art and I’m thrilled with everything. So: why onions?
Well,
For many years as a young adult, my then partner and I had very little money, and one of the cheaper things to cook was vegetable soup, which took a lot of onions. I took the responsibility of chopping and preparing all of the vegetables for our food [we were both vegetarian at the time, I am not anymore]. So ever since then, I have quite a taste for them, and I also am very practised with my knife skills, since pretty much everything I've eaten for nearly a decade I have chopped myself.
Then, in 2019, I became very serious about oil painting, and began to study it in a structured fashion, according to the principles of training that i learned from a book called Don't Shoot The Dog, by karen pryor, and some additional information from Thinking In Pictures, by Temple Grandin, and other books as well. I followed video tutorials on youtube [the channel is drawmixpaint if you'd like to look through it].
I wanted very badly to succeed, so i gave myself several achievable goals, the first of which being paintings of symmetrical white objects. I needed to learn how to use a proportional divider, and recognize different values, and i did eventually learn these skills through painting things that were very simple and didn't have any sort of pattern or high contrast areas.
I then had to work very very hard in my illustration job and once i had completed a month of working more or less 8 hours a day, every day, on drawing, i went to the grocery store to buy myself some carnations [i was very fond of carnations at that time], and as i wandered around the store i came upon this massive, squat, yellow onion. I was completely taken by the beauty and size of it, and i thought, i deserve something nice, and i think i can figure out how to paint a yellow onion, now that i had done around five paintings of white objects and a couple value studies of the faces of some friends of mine. I bought the onion, and, on a whim, bought a head of garlic that had grown so successfully that the cloves had split the outer skin and exposed a cleavage beneath. I took them home and painted them over a period of three days, and felt such exaltation at my success that i wanted to feel that again. Onion and Garlic is still, i think, the best thing i've ever painted.
I then visited montreal to visit a friend of mine, and during our week we visited the montreal art museum, which has an excellent collection of large scale dutch still life paintings. we stood for hours in the still life hall, and our legs ached, but the paintings were so beautiful and fine that the pain of tearing my eyes from them nearly eclipsed the pain in my knees from standing around in heels for hours at a time. i should have worn more sensible shoes, but i really live for aesthetics.
When i returned home i was determined to paint something like what i had seen in the museum, so after a while i visited walmart and picked out twenty-three [or twenty-six? i can't remember now] onions and shallots and arranged them on my black desk, which is what the painting called "Onions" is based on. I wanted to paint a scene of plenty. it took forty one days to complete, and i know this because it was from life, and at about the thirtieth day they began to rot on my table and I had to race to complete the painting before i started really suffering from spores.
Onions have a certain erotic nature to them as well, once you really start to look at them, and if you are of a certain temperament. There is delicacy and robustness to them, and yet they also, to me anyway, present a stalwart humility that i wanted to portray. it is, after all, only an onion, and i am, after all, only a person. theres nothing so commonplace as an onion.
oh and also i wanted something that wouldn't immediately rot on my table lol, that was the original reason that i just remembered.
the cinnamon screech owl is a small owl found primarily in the andes of ecuador and peru. due to their hard-to-access habitat & nocturnal habits, they are rarely observed. they primarily inhabit humid montane forests. they feed on large arthropods and small mammals. they are named for their light rusty brown coloration, which can vary from bird to bird.
the worst part of my job (standing around at college orientations being Visibly Queer) is when parents nervously alter their entire walking trajectory to stay out of range as if I'm going to bite them and pass on my infectious homosexuality.
this is wildly eclipsed by the best part of my job, parents who are such wildly enthusiastic allies that their children seem a little embarrassed about it. I'm talking parents who eagerly point out my little rainbow-draped table and urge their kids to come over, parents who excitedly pick through my button box offering up the relevant pride flags and pronouns to their kids, parents who have detailed questions about harassment policies and gender affirming care while their kids are trying to wander away, parents who rush over with open arms and obvious glee on their faces knowing there's a space on campus dedicated to keeping their kids safe.
the ferocity with which these parents love and affirm their queer kids is so humbling and wonderful.
Everyone in the replies saying "maybe we should normalize telling people we don't want to talk instead hmmm?" Have never not been in a good mindset to reply. And to that I say, maybe we should normalize not expecting people to reply to all of our messages right away, hmmm? Not everything is about you, and people going through a hard time don't owe you attention or an explanation of behaviour that doesn't hurt you.
hate it when people say frogs and turtles and fish and snakes can't love their owners. or bugs can't truly love their bug owners. or even that houseplants can't love. all of these creatures can be gentle. they can see you give them food. they return to you by instinct, or by choice. they see you and recognize you. plants feel their surroundings and reach out with their vines and appreciate you by taking your love and growing from it. in every life is a type of love, and it is always very different but very real.
actually i'm gonna take this further. digital pets are coded to appreciate and care about you and when you feed them their digital treats, you are experiencing real love and care and they were built to show love back. your pokémon love you. your nintendogs loved you. the universe loves you because it gave you air to breathe. the ants in the dirt love the treat you left out for them that one time. and you were the life that shared it with them. you are loved by interacting with the world in your many ways. you are loved by the emotions within you as they make you act and feel. your artist tools and instruments love you as you create with them, and they give back to create a collaboration. your food loves you by creating flavor as you prepare it. mutual love is appreciation for what life gives back to you and it will find you in new and raw ways even when you feel like love is no where, or when you think you can't feel it anymore.
hate it when people say frogs and turtles and fish and snakes can't love their owners. or bugs can't truly love their bug owners. or even that houseplants can't love. all of these creatures can be gentle. they can see you give them food. they return to you by instinct, or by choice. they see you and recognize you. plants feel their surroundings and reach out with their vines and appreciate you by taking your love and growing from it. in every life is a type of love, and it is always very different but very real.
