All day today–especially while doing my newest Zentangle–my mind has been on transitions. Part of that may be due to the topic of transitions covered in a recent One Zentangle a Day lesson; part may be from having had far too many personal transitions during the past six months. A lot may simply because we may need to think about transitions over the course of the next few years yet again. But the topic became a rather rigid Zentangle tile which I named Transitions? The question mark is part of the title, since I am clueless right now. 

One of the purposes of Zentangling is to free the mind and go into a meditative state while concentrating on each new stroke of the pen. There are enough irregularities in this tile, basically reflecting how difficult it was to keep my mind occupied with the tile and patterns instead of on what is bothering me. Aside from its rigidity, it is messier than I would have liked. Usually, if I am in a rigid state of mind, my work is flawless–and highly boring. This tile, despite the regimentation of moving soldier-like from one pattern to a similar one, is poorly shaded. On the one hand, the basic structure is strictly defined by the strings I drew; on the other, between pattern errors and shading errors, it reflects closely the difficulty I am having adjusting to the cataract surgery I had almost three months ago. Usually, I can see just fine–for both distance and reading, even with the monovision lenses (one eye for close work, the other for distance). I just hadn’t thought about how going with monovision would affect my art work. That is what I was thinking about the most while working today: that I have been noticing the difficulty of working closely with a small tile and, essentially, only one eye that could see what I was doing. 

The difficulty has made me rethink whether I should continue with Zentangles–specifically, with working using the tiles which are so small–or whether I should continue learning new motifs but going with ZIA (Zentangle Inspired Art), which can be done on much larger paper, and which does not require me to get so close to my work. In other words, another transition. 

But what is one more transition among many?

And there’s another inspiration for a story or blog post… 

#educ_dr