Happy 2024! I spent the first two weeks of it singing many songs hoping they would turn to truth. Most of January was a dream. I weaved in and out of places like a thread. I have scratchy, careless sketches to remember them by.
I went to Sevilla in the last week of the year, and perhaps it was a thing of feeling, but there I saw the most blue I had ever seen in my life. It was so peculiar and I kept wondering where I was or what I might become - like matter suspended in a sea of blue, blue sea in a field of blue, blue field in firmament of blue. The sunset was blue - the mountains in the distance, enrobed in royalty. Like clockwork all the songs ever written about blue started to surface.
Everything was blue, and I just lay in it. I sat yielding to its intensity. When we retreated from the sea and the sky I needed only the wall tiles and pavers of the city to shroud me in blue again.
It was a truly special moment, and I think for the first time in my life I was not scrambling to make sense of it. Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to, or where to begin. But I stared it down almost in defiance. As if to say I was not afraid of that blue of distance, that blue of silence, everything refusing to speak. I could rest in it and not be changed. I could yield to it and still be here. The blue could persist for a long time. I didn’t have to become it to matter.
So I didn’t overthink it. These weeks deep in blue I thought about my work, about the remit of my hands - my use of them, my rest of them. I slept a lot. I read a few books. I wrote so much. I drew everything loosely. I threw many bowls and made plans for them. I made a calendar of images I liked. I mourned and rejoiced and cried and laughed, all of it.
I don’t know what all this blue is for but I am building life in it. It is somewhat like surrender, really, with a fierceness and precision that feels foreign to me. It feels like drawing a line. It feels like making a map and I am prising myself from the landscape. And here it feels like morning all day.
With love
Chelsea