I'm going in circles and maybe that's not always a bad thing.

(Or maybe it is. I should probably ask a therapist.)

Last week I was trying to get back in the habit of drawing but nothing was turning out the way I wanted it to so instead I went back to something basic….circles.

Did you ever hear the story about Giotto? He’s this famous artist from the Middle Ages. The Pope asked all the best artists to submit drawings demonstrating their skill and everyone submitted complicated, beautiful works except for Giotto, who sent in a single, perfect red circle he drew free-hand, demonstrating his skill with something so simple yet absolutely perfect.

I’m no Giotto so when I need to draw a perfect circle I just turn over my popcorn bowl and trace it and honestly that works fine. No Pope complaints yet. Also, I just looked up the details to make sure I got this story right and turns out Giotto sent the circle by messenger so he totally could have been lying and tracing popcorn bowls or whatever the medieval equivalent is. Wagon wheels maybe? Actually the Pope should have been the most impressed by the guy who made wagon wheels because if drawing a perfect circle is impressive imagine making matching pairs of them out of wood.

Sorry…got off track.

This week I traced a perfect circle and then filled it in with very imperfect circles, which would have looked awful alone, but once you get enough of them they start to look intentional and interesting in spite of the fact that they’re just circles I drew to keep my hands busy so they wouldn’t destroy me.

“Death waited patiently. “It’s your choice,” he said. She’d never seen her life from here…the tiny patterns repeating. Round and round. Over and over. Whirlwinds. Like hurricanes of destruction. Carousels of Joy. Like the playground merry-go-round…the spinning and glee and wind sucking away your breath and the salty blood from chipped teeth. She closed her eyes and smiled and said, “Again.”

The prompt for this week (if you want one) is “circles.” And I’m loving all of the photographs and drawings and poems and crafts being shared in the comments so don’t stop. You can’t share an image but you can post a link to whatever you want to share. I’m even seeing people starting their own substacks just to share their art and remind them that time enjoyed creating is never time wasted.

Also, I realize that a lot of you like to print my stuff and color it and I’m not sure how well the circle thing lends itself to coloring so here’s a bonus drawing that you may not have seen before because it only made it into a very limited edition of my book, YOU ARE HERE.

“Where you come from is not who you are.”

And now I’m going to start a whole new circle drawing because sometimes patterns are made to be repeated and because I think it would be interesting to see how it would look with different sized pen thickness. It might look terrible, but I’ll never know if I don’t try.

Pictured: Utterly enthralled art critic who has had enough of this bullshit and is not moving until petted.