Week 6: Moving Forward

31/10/16 - 04/11/16

So uni work has pretty much come to halt in recent weeks, hence why there hasn't been any blog posts. Sadly my Granddad passed away a few weeks ago and I just haven't had motivation to work since. I've been back at my parents house, which makes uni work difficult normally, never mind when everyone is grieving. It was literally half an hour after my first tutorial of the year that my Mum phoned to let me know. He'd been in hospital for about 5 weeks, but it was still a surprise, I'd only saw him 4 days beforehand and he was talking about how he just couldn't wait to get down the pub when he got out. I tried to sit and do work a few times, but I'd just end up sat there empty and thoughtless or crying, which isn't very useful when I'm using quick, it'd effect the colour too much! After a week or so though, I did manage to pull myself away from family and just have some time on my own to paint - again, I did these quite slowly. Just to relax myself and used it as a distraction from everything that had been going on. The middle two drawings only taking an hour or two but the top and bottom took me about 5 hours each - a little bit due to the fact that I was doing lots of tiny fineliner marks; but mainly because I would just stop, sit there and just think about nothing. Literally nothing. I've never been so empty. I've got everyone telling me not to worry about uni, focus on myself and allow myself to grieve, "you can apply for extension", my brother's now on his 4th year of extension for goodness sake, I don't want that. I know I can get it in on time, and I'm going to. Everyone in my class has things going on that get in the way of uni, sometimes you've just got to get on with it! And actually, painting and continuing with my work really did help once  I got into it, it just took a while, but it's extremely therapeutic and times like this. 

I'm hoping to be back at uni properly next week - the funeral is on Monday, but after that. I really need to get back on track. It's almost 3 weeks now that I've been off and I just can't afford to waste anymore time.