Art Emnida

D reams, lately, have felt like a mirror I can’t avoid. They have a way of untangling and exposing thoughts and emotions that, in waking life, I manage to ignore. There was a time when I painted every day, and wrote every day. Each morning I kept a dream journal, capturing whatever fragments remained before they slipped away. Those dreams, strange, vivid, and often overwhelming, would find their way into my work. They fueled it. They gave shape to things I didn’t yet understand. But like my painting, that practice eroded. Between circumstance and health, something wore down. The creative instinct that once felt constant has atrophied. My dreams changed with it. They became smaller, heavier. No longer imaginative or inspiring, but repetitive. Workdays replayed in full, or sprawling, labyrinthine reflections of past trauma. Dreams where I would live through an entire shift and feel it, or wander through endless, shifting discomfort. I would wake up already tired, already in pa...

Pictured Work "Faeus Specimen" illustration challenge submission © E N Dawson June 2024 O verall my two thousand and twenty four was much of a year for celebration. I had planned out the year to start seriously creating a body of work in preparation for upcoming conventions and competitions. I had completed some commissions and had other small projects underway, with a Kickstarter anticipated for June. I was optimistic.  This all fell apart in July. I was already incredibly stressed out having taken on a significant added load of work at my corporate day job, and the project I was looking forward to did not go into motion until the end of the season, when I got sick. I've been ill before, significantly ill, and went through covid just like any other person. This time it was relentless. I took a little over two months off work, returning at odd intervals before crashing once again and struggled through pneumonia. I exhausted all my annual and sick leave, and also took t...