The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

Today I did some torso touch ups and I worked on the legs and the cloth. I wasn’t happy with how the torso looked before so I went back and worked on it some more. Digital paint just doesn’t look as good as physical paint to me. There’s always something about it that you can tell it wasn’t done with real paint. There’s a flatness about it. Some people can make digital work look really good in their own way not trying to imitate a physical medium exactly, but when you do a copy of an old painting on the iPad it just doesn’t look as good as a copy in physical paint. I’m still enjoying the process though. It’s not as stressful as the PPE paintings are because I don’t care as much about how this one looks in the end. The entire project is just done for fun and practice.

When people can sit down most days and dedicate themselves to creating art for long periods of time (I’m thinking many hours) I really feel jealous and I admire them. I can barely sit still for 15 minutes and need tons of breaks when I paint.

I wish I was as focussed on art as I am when I run. When I run I listen to books and I can sort of zone out for several hours and just do the thing. With art I sit, I get squirmy, I need to break, I sit, I get squirmy, I need to break. There’s no zoning out or just getting lost in the act of painting, even if I put on a book to listen to while I do it.

I started looking for work. Mostly I’m using Indeed, Craigslist, and the Oregon DHS website (for State jobs) because I discovered the bulk of jobs on LinkedIn are posted by scammers. There are some fake job posts on Craigslist and Indeed too, but not nearly as many as on LinkedIn (and Indeed has a rating system so you can tell right off if something is dodgy). They really should do something about the amount of fake postings they have. It’s ridiculous. There are hundreds of jobs by the same “companies” posted over and over which is really obviously a scam. There are a few that are harder to tell because they aren’t duplicated, but a quick google search of the company can tell you if it’s a known scam or not. Plus if they respond almost instantly saying you got through to the next step without any sort of interview process, it’s a giant red flag.