Post #745107 by Tiki Shark Art on Wed, Jun 17, 2015 5:44 PM

Aloha Tiki Tribe!

OK…
I'm having one of those "Artist Block" things.

Ever since my "lower back procedure" I have not had a painting session that I would call my "best" level of work.

Sure it was very tender, and now it's healed up a lot. I'm happy that in general my pain level is much lower now too. I'm doing a bunch of physical therapy, and well, I guess you'd call them "life style changes " to fix my back and just keep my body more pain free and in better working condition in general, now that I am ..ah…over the big five Oh on the milage gage. (!) I had an appointment with my doc. A follow up. These things usually go 15 maybe 30 minutes. This one went almost 3 hours!
Sheesh!

I had a whole bunch of questions. I even brought in Abbas (my career steering "Art Agent Extraordinair") to make sure I didn't miss any questions, & that every thing's gonna' be in fine working' order to get me to my BIG Tiki-Art show next JULY 2016 at La Luz in Holly-weird. ( stay tuned and see if I make it or not! )

Abbas, as expected, made sure we cut through the "cha-cha" and got down to brass tacks.

Well, It helps that my doc is the head of "Pain Management" for Kaiser here in the state of Hawaii, so he's seen hundreds and thousands of folks with this same darned old lower back pain. He can pretty much tell if someone is gonna' be likely to get better or not.

Happily, he sez I'm in a good mental place to "do what-ever it's gonna' take" to heal up. Plus, he's got a lot of sports-training-&-medicine N' his back ground. That's good, cause' some of my pain is from old judo (& other martial arts) injuries from when I was younger and I thought I was gonna' be Bruce Lee. (like I found out I broke my leg in collage during a Judo bout and never had it looked at or set right! That explains all that limping I was doing for a few months.)

It also helps that Ol' Doc "Painless-John" is a Tiki-Art fan, & he really digs my art!

So... from "Marital", to "commercial", to "comic-book", to "video & computer game", to "movie-production", and finally to "Tiki" I always wanted to be an ARTIST.
Seems this kinda' pain is not uncommon for artists. All that crouched over a story board, a keyboard, a canvas, or what ever… you can hurt your back.

There is no easy fix, no pill, no simple surgery, to fix-up what I got myself into. Seems it'll take a change in the way I do a lot of stuff… like how I'm sitting or standing when I paint.

Anyways, been working on the sky on this "Nightmare" painting… and I have not been able to shade the sky the way I want to.
I'm working through some pain. Making sure I don't over do the pain killers. Sitting up straight. All that. AND experimenting with my techniques.

Think I had a break through last night.
Let's see if I can put it on the canvas today…

ALOHA!

[ Edited by: Tiki Shark Art 2015-06-20 04:14 ]