LIVING CREATIVELY
Full House
This painting has taken ridiculously long to complete. Yes, there was lots to it but then again not. It’s been something of a Zen experience, repeating petals but with variations. Each one different. What, at first glance looked like a simple coral zinnia turns out to be, instead, a zinnia of many colors. I started it on September 8. I finished it this morning. Sheesh.
But that’s not what delayed my work.
I’ve been sifting through my possessions, tossing, keeping and reorganizing. I’ve painted...
A Happy Little Flower
There have been many people and places in my life that have made me happy.
I’m so grateful to have been born into a loving, stable family and have been granted so many gifts flowing out of that simple event that I’m embarrassed to recount them all. I did absolutely nothing, just flopped out of my mother’s belly one day and there it was.
Over my many years of my life I have had the pleasure to meet people along that the way that have brought joy into my life. That's not to say there haven’t...
Girls
There has been no shortage of girls in my life. Afterall, I was born a girl and am now a woman, a rather older woman hoping to continue getting older for at least a while.
I had a mother and I’ll take a wild guess and say that you have or had one as well. But I was also born into a family with three girls, me being the fourth (and no brothers). And, at one time seven aunts (though two died in childhood). I had 10 female cousins but only two lone male cousins. Already there’s a surplus of females...
Stargazer
I had the great good fortune to have spent a month near Jackson Hole in my last two summers before teen-hood. My parents dropped me off at Union Station with some fellow campers from Southern California and waved us goodbye.
On the trip north we saw the back alleys and rear entrances of businesses in cities and towns big and small. We roamed the train as it lumbered through dunes and chaparral, annoying the porters and buying tuna sandwiches in the club car. As we ventured further, we snuck...
Flowers for Mother
It was an inevitability.
The Hallmark cards never captured the experience. Every year they asked me what I wanted for Mother’s Day. And every day I said the same thing...I wanted nothing except for a day without conflict. No breakfast in bed. No reservations at a local restaurant. No fancy jewelry or clothes. No crying, no arguments, no tattling.
Just a nice day with those I loved best, my children. Ah, a mother can dream.
It started with some cards and devolved from there. I think it...
Aphoristically Speaking
My shoulder still isn’t 100%. Probably more like about 87%. Many things don’t bother it at all, but some really do and one of those things, unfortunately, has been painting.
One day, while pondering this dismal situation I remembered back to many years ago, a little strip of paper taped to my bathroom mirror. It read, “do what you can, with what you have, where you are”*. During that time of uncertainty those words gave me direction for my present and hope for my future.
So, as I tried to...
Un-Scared
I’m ashamed to report how long it has taken me to paint these two very small paintings. It’s certainly not because they were miniatures, hardly. They’re both 8” x 10”.
Doable? Maybe, maybe not.
I had lots of excuses along the way: traveling, house projects, a game arm, all the painting I did earlier in the year. In the end, pretty hollow stuff.
What really happened was I froze. I’d come into the studio and I’d get an odd feeling in my stomach. It was beyond simple procrastination...
Remembering Summer
Way back in the spring I was furiously painting in order to have enough pieces for the summer group show. Then I was furiously framing
I was looking forward to a break. I had been at the easel from March to mid-July for what felt like every day towards the same end, to get the work done. Oh, and I also redesigned my website, completed a commission and nursed my painting arm shoulder injury.
But it was all worth it.
At the reception I met a lovely woman who had remembered one...
Center Court
I had planned to write this post yesterday and in so doing check a number of things off my to do list which had grown substantially while working on my latest painting. Instead, I spent nearly five hours watching two grown men bang a small neon yellow ball across a low net. I squirmed thinking about all the things I had hoped to accomplish but the longer it went on, the more invested I became. Almost five hours! I have no idea how they kept moving. Why didn’t their arms drag as the match wore on?...
Waterfall
I’ve sat next to all manner of waterfalls. The kind you unexpectedly come upon on a hike and need to figure out how to get over; the little creek cascades that trip pool to pool and disappear under deep forest growth; and the grander ones you seek out deliberately from maps, following signs through parking lots and down wooden walkways. Big or small they impart sensations of awesome power and hypnotic serenity. Even the behemoth Niagara Falls, with all its well-worn commercialism and history delivers.
Falling...