My Stumble with Eglė Ruškytė
So, I ran into this name, Eglė Ruškytė. Honestly, can’t remember where I saw it first. Maybe scrolling online late at night, maybe some obscure art blog post. Don’t know. But something about the style, or maybe just the name itself, stuck in my head. This was around the time that big project at work collapsed, you know the one. Left me with a lot of time and this weird feeling of needing to do something with my hands, something completely different.
Anyway, I figured, why not try whatever this Eglė Ruškytė thing was about? Looked like some kind of textured painting, maybe mixed media. Hard to tell from the tiny image I vaguely recalled. So, I went digging. Not much out there, or at least, not much easy stuff to find. Typical.
I decided to just wing it based on the feeling I got. Grabbed some old paints I had lying around. Found some putty filler stuff in the garage. Thought maybe that could work for texture. Spread some cheap canvas board on the floor – didn’t want to mess up the table.
- First, I just slapped some dark paint down as a base.
- Then, I tried mixing that putty stuff with some lighter paint. Bad idea. Turned into this clumpy grey mess.
- Tried spreading it. Looked awful. Like bad plastering.
- Scraped most of it off with a palette knife. Left some streaks.
It felt dumb, honestly. Sitting there making mud pies with paint. Reminded me of trying to get different software bits to talk to each other on that failed project. Everything just fighting everything else, ending up with junk. You spend hours trying to force it, and it just resists.
Took a break. Made coffee. Came back and looked at the mess. The scraped-off bits actually looked slightly interesting in a weird way. So, I leaned into that. Didn’t try to make it look like anything specific anymore. Just pushed paint around, added some sand I found outside (don’t ask), layered colors without thinking too much. Let the textures happen.
The result? Still not sure what it is. Definitely not a masterpiece. Probably doesn’t look anything like actual Eglė Ruškytė work, assuming she’s even a real artist doing that style I imagined. But it was… something. A thing I made. Kept my hands busy. Better than staring at the wall, I guess. It’s sitting in the corner now. Sometimes I look at it. It’s rough, unfinished, a bit of a failure. Kind of fits the mood, you know?
