Labrador Retrievers and Emus

Labrador Retrievers and Emus - Digital Art

For months, I’ve had this overwhelming compulsion to create this fox in my #EnsoBertha style. I find peace in allowing my mind to just “put a line here, put a curve there, colour here, shadows and highlights there”, almost mindlessly until it tells me I’m done. It isn’t lost on me how strange it is that I use these mindless actions to practice mindfulness. It sounds weird but it somewhat muffled the never-ending dialogues, monologues, questions and debates in my mind….enough that I can pause and actually observe these thoughts as well as my feelings without being hijacked by them (Last night the simple thought, “I wonder how much an emu weights?”, was sooooo loud, I had to listen and before I knew it, it had led me down a rabbit hole of details about multiple flightless birds….incidentally, they weight about as much as a Labrador Retriever…Ostriches on the other hand weight somewhere between 3 to 5 Labrador Retrievers)….but I digress. Let’s get back to my mindless creating…It helps me make sense of all the senseless chaotic noise in my head. Kind of how looking at a mess of lines and circles and colour can suddenly look like a fox-like thing.

Funny realization after I finished this Fox. I looked up what the symbolism of foxes is. Imagine my surprise when I learned they tend to represent Intelligence, Adaptability, Resourcefulness, Strategic, Shrewdness and Intuition. All things I value very much and work hard on. Maybe a part of me was trying to tell the rest of me something by pushing me over and over to create this piece 🤷🏾‍♀️.

Well I hope the final creation and random story time that goes with it. It took over 60 hours of work and mindfulness to get to the end.