untilted dot lol blog (dotart.blog's version)

I've spent at least a year shaping my artistic identity through my webcomic, but now I've been feeling a restless desire to explore other artistic media beyond the digital webcomic format. Now, to be clear, I haven't given up on it, but I've been really getting into other things while still working on the comic. The most I've done so far is translate foreign-language poetry, buy embroidery equipment for myself for the first time, and get into calligraphy pens. Although things have been pretty stagnant for me in general, those were a few of the things that broke it somewhat, though I'm not sure if I want to incorporate them into my comic. I think I want to get into them more as a stand-alone thing.

Let me start by saying this: I never really had a thing for poetry until recently, because most of my exposure to it came through school assignments, rather than by my own curiosity and choice. In the classroom I was handed a stack of popular verses by Walt Whitman and the like, and told to hunt for metaphors, to label the themes, and to write tidy essays that proved I understood the “meaning” the teacher expected.

I briefly listened to his excerpts from the verses of the one who wrote of evening stars and unrequited love when I was a girl, tuning into foreign radio stations that spilled melodies and spoken word across borders. Those early glimmers were background noise to my own life at the time, so it never prompted me to dig deeper. It was only until around the winter of 2025, when I finally sat down to read and analyze one of his most celebrated poems, that the words somehow leapt from the page for me. The act of deciphering his lines forced me to linger on each syllable, each choice of image, each subtle shift in tone. The feeling that followed was unlike any I had felt before – simultaneously ecstatic, melancholic, and oddly surreal.

Knowing in fragments his turbulent life, his contentious stances, and the tragic way he succumbed to poor medical treatment that left him dead, added a haunting layer to my experience with his work. The knowledge that his voice, once vibrant with love for his country and his ideals, was silenced by the very institutions he might have revered (or condemned), created a strange mixture of admiration and sorrow. I am aware that my grasp of his native language is imperfect and that the context is kind of patchy.

The melancholy that settles over me is not merely the sadness of a bittersweet verse; it is the recognition of the space between the soaring aspirations in the lines he writes and the grim outcomes of his own existence. The gaps in my understanding – of his country's history, of the nuance, of any cultural subtleties I might have missed – do not hinder me; they seem to widen the space where imagination can fill in, allowing me to feel more freely.

In this renewed relationship with poetry, I have discovered that the emotional core of the art lies beyond educational dissection. It lives in the cadence of the Eastern Romance language, in the resonance of cosmic symbols that transcend time, and in the magic that occurs when a truly curious reader actively reconstructs meaning. The poems I now cherish today are to me intimate conversations that I have chosen to enter, guided by curiosity and a willingness to feel. The shift from analysis to immersion has opened a channel through which the words can finally touch the parts of me that were once dormant, allowing a flood of feeling that is all at once joyous, wistful, and profoundly human.

And then there's calligraphy, with all its disciplined elegance. The rhythmic sweep of the ink of my new calligraphy pens across paper (or the digital screen – I just got an actual Wacom touchscreeen pen!) urges me to attend to the minutiae of pressure, angle, and tempo. I've been sitting at a small wooden desk, my hand learning to tame the flowing black ink and all that. Writing not only letters in English/Latin characters but also Cyrillic and sometimes Perso-Arabic. Admiring the visual beauty of each stroke as well as nurturing patience, a quality that has often been tested in the slightly more frenetic pace of my digital works.

I've been thinking about getting into making postcards. With foreign words on them. Except I don't really want to do just pretty intricate decorative designs or pretty pictures of various photography. I want to keep doing my abstract art, but I also want to add a kind of relatable beauty to it. Or something. We will see!

And finally, embroidery. Threading a needle with silk or cotton, selecting colors that harmonize, a steadiness of hand and a mindfulness that aligns my thoughts with each knot, communicating a conversation between the material and my intent, allowing me to contemplate each decision. I'm keeping that mostly personal for now. Although I'd like to say it is mostly inspired by eastern European folk art.

Sorry for the brevity. I've been advised to keep it short in a digestible way. I've also been quiet lately due to emotional issues lately.

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