A Hundred reEnchantments
the creative origin story of a drawing collection
This year is my tenth year as a human who draws.
I started drawing in 2013 before that I had not drawn. It was quite a surprise for me and quite a shock for my right wrist, who began to draw out of nowhere for hours, lost on the surface of a paper. For the first five years, it was like a stream of consciousness to me, or a stream of imagination as I like to call it. I streamed drawing and my wrist wrote many letters of complaints to me. I read them and we found our creativity rhythm…
I drew a hundred cards during a one-hundred-day creative challenge back in 2017.
I called them 100 reEnchantments, the reEnchantment Cards. What are they? They are a bee, a feather, an acorn, an egg, a star, a butterfly, a temple, a sword…
Back in the day I wrote these sentences to my Instagram while introducing this creative project and I am quoting my (2017) self: “Since I was born, the planet and the universe we live in and are a part of never ceased to amaze me. Even on my darkest days and nights, I felt the vibration of the creative (and destructive) energy in my entire being. Therefore, I am eternally enchanted by imagination, mystery and creativity. And naturally also very disenchanted when they lack... Each day is an invitation to re-enchant ourselves through this beautiful web of imagination and creativity. For 100 days, I will be creating 100 reEnchantments.”
And every day1 I drew and gifted the day an enchantment.
At the end, I had 100 Enchantments. I loved the process. I loved the re-enchantments. So much so I would print them and gift them to people. Many joined me in loving them and that made me dream more, like I dreamt of making a deck with them.
Then life began to explore other things and its events started to intensify once again, demanding my time and space. The Re-Enchantment Cards had to wait in my drawer for three years before I could do anything with them, whilst the enchantment and disenchantment of reality had its thing with me.
The drawer has its own kind of magic, it is known to many creators of this planet. Many manuscripts, many sketches, many drawings lived in the drawers of their creators.
In spring 2020, there was a Venus retrograde in Gemini (that I will not forget2 because…)
I suspect it was a VenusDay3, I was climbing the stairs and had this very curious whisper wondering my mother’s name’s meaning. I did not know it. In Turkish, our names tend to mean something like my name, Gizem, means Mystery. My mother’s name was Rukiye and unlike me, she was not fond of her name as far as I can remember. She shared a name with her paternal grandmother and she did not like children being named after older family members. Rukiye was also an Arabic word and evoked some religious stories. Truth to be told, this also did not make my mother love and cherish her name. Hence I never found myself wondering the meaning of my mother’s name, I thought this was the extent of her name and it did not mean anything.
That day I learned my late mother’s name, to my surprise and I suspect hers too, meant “enchantment, the enchanted one.” It was a very fitting name for her. She was quite enchanting. She was a Gemini woman and I was uncovering the meaning of her name during a Venus retrograde in Gemini. Without knowing this “intellectually”, I was naming a lot of my creative work after my mother, like the reEnchantment Cards, the reEnchantment Letters4 etc.
With this exciting discovery, I decided to create these (re)enchantments for her to celebrate her enchanted and enchanting memory. That was my motivation! In the fall of 2020, I drew and digitalised about twenty (re)enchantments, using the paper versions I drew in 2017 as a model. It was the first year of the pandemic and I was also working on my first eco fantasy story, Single Seed Tale’s first draft. My timing has always been an awkward one and Twenty Twenty was a peculiar year to “reenchant.”
I stopped. We stopped with the reenchantment cards.
I cannot quite recall the entire story of why beyond the times (and the quality of times are quite something when it comes to creativity), but there was an issue with the resolution of the digital files. I knew I had to redo those twenty drawings and I did not want to. My cat companion was sitting on everything I drew back then and I was losing my mind with an extremely noisy neighbourhood while trying to write a fantasy story, the pandemic was deepening, so was the isolation. Overall, they were not the times of enchantment or reenchantment. I had to let the times be…
And came the year of death and sickness: 2021. Hello grief, my old friend.
My grandfather died. My cat companion got sick and died. I got sick twice and struggled for months, I got infested by bird lice, I itched, my washing machine boiled itself to death around the time the ocean was burning… I did not create enchantments and they did not want to be created. Instead, I spent most of my time being sick, taking care of the sick and dead. I buried my cat companion into my mother’s grave with my own hands. I frequented the cemetery, sat by the grave of enchantment and made offerings to it. That too was a massive enchantment.
Now, here we are in twenty twenty three and enchantments are blinking again. I do not know about you but I need beauty and creativity, so does my planet. And I feel I have the power and creative gusto at the moment. So, first I am redrawing the ones I had already drawn and digitalised with better resolution and some different creative choices. Once I finish them, I will continue with others if the mystery wants and allows. Who knows, perhaps this is a lifelong collection. I will draw enchantments until I run out of time and die or the Earth runs out of enchantments. Latter less likely.
Today, on this roaring Venus Cazimi day, I sensed that if I do not share some of my shapes here, I might be bitten by cosmic lions. I am not taking the risk of a cosmic bite. 2015 was the year of the first creative challenge I have ever participated. Back then, I was just beginning to draw and I was loving the creative process. Mind you, there was another Venus retrograde in Leo back in 2015.5
There is no creativity without the process. There is no “ let there be feather” and there is feather. Creativity is not about finished fixed creation. Creativity is an ever-imaginative, ever-evolving, ever-storytelling, wildly chaotic, magical, relational participatory and alchemical journey. I am trying to share bits and pieces of my creative process through stories on Instagram while I create the reenchantments.
This feels like an era of enchantment, disenchantment and reenchantment in my creative universe and beloved planet. Therefore, you come across with that word, that name of my mother's often in my creations. Whispering through me, let it enchant, let it enchant, let it enchant…
Wish for it if you like to see more drawings and creativity here, wish away if not. Who knows what happens, it is rather mysterious how mystery mystifies.
Have an enchanted Venus Cazimi.
Much Wild Imagination and Deep Creativity,
Gizem
© Gizem Gizegen, 2023 Istanbul, ☉ Leo ☽ Cancer ♀ Cazimi in Leo
Almost every day. I missed couple of days because of work, because of lack of time, and made up for them the next days.
Astrological events help me mark, track and weave these dates, I would otherwise not remember. That is why I love Astrology and storytelling with them.
Also known as Friday/Vendredi to muggles and with all sorts of different names to imaginative ones.
my old newsletter.
If you do not understand and/or connect with my astrological storytelling and you wish to… you can refer to my writings about the topic (like Enchanted Zodiac and Venus, Mon Amour) and slowly and deliciously ease yourself into that. If you do not, simply discard those parts. Thank you for reading with or without astrological bits.
It was a pleasure to read about your journey through creativity and re enchantment 🩵