Lerning to Relax

Well, yesterday was an interesting day with a fair amount of stress. This morning Mariel and I awoke to discover that last night I cracked the screen of her macbook while we were cleaning up her apartment. This meant that our workflow was disrupted, which is particularly annoying given that we have to present our work to our thesis adviser tomorrow.
When things can become a bit overwhelming, I've always enjoyed looking at abstract painting. Its easily accesible human emotions always seem to help me sort out my head and get a new perspective on everything going on. I came across these paintings from Derek Lerner's Asvirus series a little while ago and found myself revisiting and enjoying them today.
When I look at abstract art, for an instant I usually have a knee jerk reaction worrying "am I reading this right?" Ultimately though, from my perpective, whatever message I take away is what I have, and no artist's statement can alter that. This isn't to say that I think the will of the artist should be entirely ignored, clearly the painter has something to say and wants to be heard, but I just don't think its worth getting caught up in attempting to decypher a coded message to the point where I lose sight of the original work, and its meaning to me.