My Sketchbook | Sketches Inspired By Obscure Sorrows

Today I am going to share with your four pages from my sketchbook. I am a bit reluctant to show them here because they are not great, unlike @adelepazani's fantastic sketches. However, I am finally at the age that I don't bother about what people think of my work and so here they are. I mean if I care too much about less than positive comments, I have no business flaunting my work here (or anywhere else) for the world to gawk at. If you like it, great! if you don't, no problem too!

So enough on the pep talk and let's move on to the sketches.

I think about a year ago I came across this very cool website that list down obscure sorrows (words) that describe certain feelings and experiences that are hard to describe. Here is the link to that website: Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I could spend hours just going through the list and watching the videos. Yes, it has its own Youtube channel too and some of the videos are so beautifully shot and edited they made me cry. If you are a writer or a bookworm, I am sure you will love it too. Do check it out!

So far my most favorite word is this Portuguese word saudade;

Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. ~ Wikipedia

Just love it.

That is just one word in a list of many intriguing words of which four of it inspired four of my sketches below. These sketches are just the ideas I have. The final paintings/arts might be totally different from this. However, these images came to my mind when I first read the words and their meanings. I will not share my thought process here but I will share more about them in (future) individual posts I will make when each painting completed.

The sketches

Sketch #1 is inspired by the word "altschmerz"

"weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had - the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago." ~ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Sketch #2 is inspired by the word "exulansi"

"the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land." ~ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Sketch #3 is inspired by the word "zenosyne"

"the sense that time keeps going faster." ~ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Sketch #4 is inspired by the word "onism"

"the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience." ~ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows