Yeah, OK. Not my best.

I wound up doing two forms today.  Today’s the 21st, and I want to get done up through single whip, which is hard. It involves a turn, and I’m not sure how to express that in two dimensions. This cartoon figure is all very well and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that tai chi is four-dimensional — it’s movements in space, in time, and that means tracking both directional changes as well as tempo.

Hmmm.

BUT.  One of the senior druids on our list has joked about how, in three hundred years, maybe druids will be the martial artists of the North American landscape, wielding k’ung fu powers against bandits so no one will mess with them even though they’re unarmed.  Seems highly unlikely, really.  Most of the druids that I know are not really up to that challenge.

But.

Druidry does have a color theory associated with the directions, which I admit is likely derived much from Wicca and other sources in ceremonial magic.  By adding in color wash behind the figure, I can suggest which direction is behind, to the left, and to the right of each figure, and so give a sense of how the motion is supposed to go. I’ll try it tomorrow and see.

The form work itself was rudimentary. I was not happy with my first run-through of the form, so I did it again. Still pretty basic, even as I tried to slow down to find a couple more positions in press and push to work into two separate drawings. Paper has a pretty nifty feature called “Book”, which allows one to create a 15-page Book of one’s drawings, which is printed, built and assembled by Moleskine. I had a brief thought of making a “book” of my tai chi pages; but at $25 a pop it’s expensive, and at a 15-page limit, I’d have to squeeze four forms onto a page (60 sonnets, right — Days 125 to 187, take out a couple of days for missed sonnets or complications, yeah… 60 is about right… 60/4 = 15). That means halving or even quartering the size of the drawings. I’m not sure that’s within my capacities as an artist.

I’m still not talking about the form, though.  It’s funny — I’m avoiding talking about my practice because I’m not happy with it these days.

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