The Long and Winding Road

This life gives you a vast menu of choice during your wobbly travels....well, I speak for myself, of course. But it does hold true that we go through a few transitions along the way. Youth to old age, ignorance to knowledge, amature to professional. Et-cet-ura, et-cet-ura, et-cet-ura, as they say. Transition is pretty much a constant force; you have your raw ingredients which you transition by cooking and then by eating that is transitioned into the things your body needs to survive and so on to get really carried away. Same with creating I would say. You have a vision and with the ingredients of canvas, brushes and paint , they transition the vision into a finished painting. (Or whatever your medium of choice is.) There does seem to be a starting point and then the passing of time to bring you to the end point. Sometimes it's a smooth change and other times, well, it seems to carry on for a lifetime. 

Anyisthereanythingyoucantalksensiblyaboutway, what sparked all the proceeding blather is my current 'transition' from blob artist to fit and buff artist. I am not a lover of physical fitness....and taking into account the fact that being a painter pretty much is a sedentary action - maybe if you painted very large flowing abstracts that would not hold true but I am not sure since I don't- I have been a 'couch/studio potato' for some years. Suffice to say that my personal canvas has been expanding at an alarming rate and is, without doubt, my biggest hurdle. (ha ha) This has been a decade of unending battle with all the attending woes of diets and idiotic binging behavior leading me to this point in my life of realizing that this is my last chance. I need to restretch the canvas and get it back to original dimensions or I'm for the scrap heap.  I think what frightens me most is that I am almost 60 now and I'm really just starting to get known artistically (because I wasted a lot of years being an addict, more fool me) and if I don't want to be wheeled into all the art events coming up, I'd better pay attention.

So! To this end, I've engaged the services of a personal trainer and am going every other day to the Gym to be whipped (verbally) into shape. She is really fantastic....however....

Torture. Everything hurts. And I'm exhausted. And I'm so losing any last faint glimmers of dignity when I am butt-in-the-air-red-faced-and-sweating-flailing-around-limp-whale-style while the town passes by the gym's big windows. 

But somewhere in all that is this feeling of accomplishment and self congratulatory glow for finally getting to the start of this transition. It will be a long road....which I have to keep reminding myself is just the way of it. Instant gratification desires must be quashed.

So here's to us art folks who battle this demon of fitness because, truth be told, you are usually 'discovered' later in life when those years of taken-for-granted-svelte-body has passed on by.....and you can't believe how fast that happened. 

The only way out is through.

The painting: "Transitions" by Nick Gentry. Recycled art from old cassettes and DVDs. 

I like this - and the fact he has transitioned 'other' things into art is cool. 

By the way, the title "Transitions" seems to be an extremely popular choice. I think I got around 3,000,000 hits - seriously!- with typing in that search term. 

A shared experience for sure.