drawing an avocado lightbulb
when I was a child, I used to have a notebook of visual inventions. I drew rainbow suits that dispensed ice cream, and heliocopter hats that made you fly. I treasured the book - it was where I escaped to when school was boring and life was overwhelming.
I guess I still do this. there is something magical about drawing things that don’t exist — but do, in my head — and it’s as if reality hasn’t caught up, yet. (or maybe it already exists, in another dimension.) as an adult, building a business or making art, in any form, still feels like that. an act of magic. you draw the vision, before it becomes real.
I drew this avocado lightbulb over 3 days, but it started as a “let me draw something,” and “hmm, what should I draw?” and “ah, what about a plant study - this avocado sprout on my windowsill?”
I was very proud of it. I grew it out of an avocado I ate last spring. I don’t remember that avocodo, but I will remember this sprout. how slowly its roots formed, and yet - how suddenly. how determined it was to grow and shoot itself up, which it did, (by inches, it seemed) during summer.
recently, I’ve been in business-building mode — rather than getting-lost-in-art mode. I missed the days in which I would wake up on a faraway, mystical island, sit on my front porch after breakfast, and draw something everyday, like a morning prayer; colliding the worlds I saw and the worlds within me.
that’s why I drew this avocado. first as just itself - an avocado in a glass jar - and then, I imagined it as a lightbulb. plants have energy, and electricity. one winter in Berlin, when I was sad-as-hell, I bought an entire forest to take home and fill my room with - and it was as if they absorbed my emotions, and kept me company.
in some magical world, avocado pits would light up the water their roots grew in. perhaps that world is not so far away - we just can’t see it yet.