Well at least it isn’t black. I woke up today not as well as yesterday, and I decided to move forward with a project I planned to do years ago.

I also wanted to ask myself: can you make art when you’re depressed?

My painting is one solid block of mauve with my hand print on it. It’s not a starry night because I don’t drive on Picasso’s side of the road.

Believe it or not my mauve canvas once contained all the basic colors from my color plan. It just turned out ugly. The strokes were all wrong. Then I tried to free-style and it came out chaotic, which was much too representative of the jailed up chaos in my body.

So I just kept painting forward and the mixture of colors turned into mauve. It’s not a very fun color for a backdrop. I’m thinking metallic gold might be the only paint to save it.

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I thought about just putting my canvas on pause until my mind recovers. At least I experimented and learned something new about myself. Which is no, I can’t do exactly what I planned under the condition that I am in.

I don’t even appreciate me.

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A quick google search on Mauve:

1. It’s a French word for pale bluish purple color

2. Only British aristocracy were allowed to wear this color

3. I don’t know who nix sensor is, but according to that website mauve represents youth, decadence, and femininity

4. It’s (mis) named after that mallow flower (which is basically Army purple) but that’s my opinion.

5. Spiritually it means inspiration and innovation (ha.)

6. Psychologically, mauve represents originality, thought ambition, and effortless elegance

7. It ranges in a variety of purple colors. Mine is a cross between dark mauve, taupe mauve, and rose mauve.

7. My opinion of mauve isn’t as high as the above proclamations of other people on the internet. It’s a drab color. It gives mud energy. I don’t like it.

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So I suppose I’m in my mauve era now. That is okay. Because look what happened:

In the end, depression and RM win. I realized the tone of my canvas and Namjoon’s recent song are meant to be together. This painting isn’t supposed to be a Mikrokosmos pairing, it isn’t my universe all in one canvas. This painting is reflecting my mood, and coincidentally so is Namjoon’s new song Come Back to Me.

The promotional color scheme of his album is…..mauve. It’s rose mauve, brick red, light orange and everything that my canvas is. It doesn’t have to be anything other than what it is. And this realization inspired me to make something of what I have instead of wanting it to be different.

Thanks to Namjoon (and his song) I was able to accept my painting for what it is, and to create real art. Genuine art. I superimposed his poetry on it and suddenly my painting has meaning. I wrote the lyrics in symbolic areas of my hand, being as interpretive as I can be.

Kim Namjoon never fails to let me be the real me. Whether I am the expansive night sky or just a hand in the mud trying not to sink down.

I’ll come back.

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I entered my long-loved crossing-paths photo into the raffle to be part of an ARMY Exhibition. If I’m chosen, then he gets to see it….and that would mean more to me than any rare photo card.

It feels good to submit something meaningful. It feels good to participate and enter my chances. It feels good to believe that I can win. It feels good to do something that’s meaningful to me.

That hasn’t happened in a while. It feels really good. In a way I’ve already won.