a bad idea for a painting series

I brought my portable easel to my mother's house for a weekend of house-sitting duties, and then wandered around, feeding the animals and tidying up and looking for something to paint. She has birds and statues and lots of old books, but I kept coming back to a little tarnished pewter dish that sits on one of her shelves. Every other dish in the house has collected old pennies and hair pins, but this one is always empty, because nobody touches it. I loved the dish when it was given to us as a wedding gift - back when I thought I was marrying the right person, even if I felt some uncertainty about it and had embarrassing feelings for the guy next to him. Then everything came apart, and all the years since have been after. The dish is still sitting there, painfully earnest in the before.

You should paint it! 
No.
In fact, you should paint a whole series of cursed objects!
NOOOO.

But I took the dish down and set up my easel anyway.

Everyone has these sorts of objects, hidden in drawers or under the bed or at the back of a cupboard. Evidence of dead relatives, lost loves, unsolved mysteries, narrow escapes. This particular little bowl is just one of several objects that we actively avoid disturbing. The skinwalker knife is in the kitchen junk drawer. On the top shelf of the bedroom closet is a little blue foam toddler helmet with red Valkyrie wings sewn on the sides that makes me jerk back with flashbacks of my blue and dying baby. In a photo box in the hallway closet there is a bullet-shaped magnet that left a person-shaped hole behind it. On a book shelf there is a handmade kaleidoscope my father doesn't remember giving me, even though it was the only Christmas gift he ever sent and I had been sure there was a secret, mystical mechanism to it that might connect us like magic in a storybook.

Yes, this is a good idea, let's take all these loaded artifacts and HANG THEM ON THE WALL IN OIL PAINT, SURE. That is called "relic preservation". Or "grounding a negatively charged object". Or "draining your living essence".

Me painting this thing

And so I have been fighting for three nights with a pewter whiskey quaich. I think it is only getting stronger. And maybe slightly bigger.

Maybe I should be painting other people's cursed objects. I suspect, though, that people would be quicker to pose in their old undercrackers than to lend me their horcruxes.


Some progress: