Are you sick?

There is nothing I love so much as the big bold blue sky above the start of a new adventure.

 Recently I finally invented a word for a nagging feeling I've had my whole life. The word is "place-sickness." I'd describe it as the opposite of homesickness. When you are homesick, you miss home so much that it makes you physically ill. When you are place-sick, you want to leave so much that it makes you physically ill.

I've been place-sick for longer than I can remember, because I have the most incurable case of wanderlust. I should have been born as a wandering desert nomad!

I've lived in a few varied places in my life (Tokyo, Japan; Kobe, Japan; Kansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, and for a short spell in the UK) and I go out-of-state and out-of-country several times a year. But, it's not enough. I want to live somewhere totally new every few years, not just visit and return to the same home airport. I want totally new experiences, new friends, new scenery, new ways of life, new languages, new interests and new fears, new adventures. But, currently... it's not meant to be. I am being taught patience and the ability to be content in any circumstance. Perhaps I'm in a training period or something for when I really do wander the earth...

Always the right answer: the sea.

I've realized more and more that this is why I need to create art. Getting lost in the sketching of serene faces, scribbling wildly with oil pastel as the paint drips, letting watercolor flow its own way as music from other lands fills the room... for now, that is my escape. During the times I paint, I don't feel place-sick because I feel that I'm someplace new every time. Even after I finish the pieces, I can look at them and suddenly be transported to another place... someplace uncommon and exotic.

When I start working on the floor, you know things are really serious

Maybe you need a break from negativity or the constant grim reports that fill the news. Or maybe respite from a job which exhausts you. Or time off from a not-quite-right group of friends who make you feel slightly worse each time you hang out with them. I hope that my works might be a remedy for for that type of place-sickness. I hope that you can look deeply at the colors, the faces, and quiet patterns and gold, and feel that you have been transported elsewhere. Someplace peaceful, someplace magical.

Photo by Quit Nguyen

Much more art to come. Enjoy!

J