Re-vision
Re-seeing
Re-imagining
Re-doing
These days I’m feeling kind of reborn. It’s lovely. Usually as the chapters of my life change, I feel a lot more pain. This time around, things are much lighter and easier.

Yesterday I took my work out of Gallery 133. They’ll be having their final First Friday show on the 7th. The space is being leased by someone else so that adventure is changing form. The group may seek another space and I may rejoin them there after a bit, but in the meantime, I have another location that I’m going to go to. An old friend is opening a shop in a good location which will be kind of a vintage/antique/gallery/boutique themed venture.  I think I’ll be putting a lot of work in there and it has all signs of being a good launch so far. I dig the name: Artifactia. Cool eh?

Other things… Seren is crawling well now and doing very well in all respects. She and I are going to deliver a painting this afternoon and talk with a girl about redoing her room – kind of from little girl to big girl I guess. I don’t recall her exact age, but I know we’ll have a great time drawing ideas and talking about possibilities. I hope to be able to help… Regardless, sometimes just talking about ideas helps so I’m sure it’ll be an afternoon well spent.

And the literal revision:
Some of you will, no doubt, remember a previous version of this painting. My husband was really disappointed when I repainted the background, but I’m just not going to store stuff indefinitely. I have no doubt that there was some place it could have made someone happy as it was, but repainting it made ME happy. So I did it lol… Selfish selfish me.
I think the dragonfly in the lower left stands out better now with the revision. The dragonfly was always my favorite element in the piece.

I am extraordinarily busy these days. I’m constantly packing and shipping paintings and running around to deliver paintings and things like that. Good busy. Good tired. 
Onward and upward
*

@RoakillSpatula is getting married today. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing him here in xangaland for several years now and have watched this love story evolve, the chronicle of his work to unite his life with his love’s.  It takes a lot of real work to combine two adult households, not to mention the challenges that are magnified by distance between the two.  It makes me think of the way I gave a lot of “myself” away to join my husband in marriage and the creation of a family… the endless compromises that are better left uncounted…  And the rewards that come from truly releasing some of those things that seem so unbearably important.

Over the last couple days, I’ve encountered several comments in different places wondering what it’s like to give oneself away in art… How can I sell pieces that are “me” in some way? Or, even better, assumptions about my very private internal life gleaned from images of my work. To do what I do for a living, I have to give myself away to strangers frequently… endless unmentionable compromises… Matters of pricing or convenience or detail… Matters of my self image and blunt encounters with bizarre ideas of my internal life and motives…

But it occurred to me as I spoke with another artist recently that I can no more hold my art close to myself than I can hold all my words inside. Like unspoken words, selfishly hoarded, old pieces of art clog up the pathways of my home and my heart, arresting my progress and miring me in memories and old feelings, no longer useful to me… my own antiquated ideas of self.

So I paint. Full time.  Like my life depends on it. A self-replenishing inspiration permeates the majority of my days and I must let the colors out.  I was berated for years for painting over art others loved, but they wanted me to store it and keep it safe… I can’t do that. I can’t live with it. I WILL paint over it. So, now I’m pricing stuff low so it can go away more quickly and leave me to paint over something else, less loved or less useful to the people I happen to know at the moment. 

Just yesterday, I started a serious revision of an old Water Lily painting much to the horror of my husband.
I didn’t even know he liked the piece…
But that wouldn’t have stopped me.

What is Thanksgiving at my house?  Well, since I moved away from my family, I’ve done less and less for any holiday. I don’t care for the adventure and hassle and no day seems any more special to me than any other. I’m equally happy to be alive just about any old day…
I was planning to go to a turkey day dinner at the gallery I’ve been showing at, but decided not to bother with it… I just have so much work to do… Commissions to paint, plots to scheme, websites to recode, writing to complete… Of course I pick to do this much work. I don’t like sitting around twiddling my proverbial thumbs. If I can possibly be productive with my time, I prefer that.
This is the piece I finished today – 10.5″x21″ on wood
Butterfly Over Stained Glass

Another day in the life…
I’m trying an apple cobbler experiment. I’ve never eaten apple cobbler before and my mother left me with some green apples so I thought I’d give it a try. I put a dash of cinnamon and a dash of almond extract in it and mixed molasses with the white sugar. We’re out of butter, but it might still be tasty enough… I can at least mash up some of the cooked apples for Seren.
Seren. Fat enough to roast for Thanksgiving. Bouncing and saying “mama” and “yum yum”.  Standing up in the crib and crawling about some. Feeding herself sometimes too…
One of the best things these days is she’s getting up earlier. I’ve always preferred to rise before the sun and until the days got shorter, she wanted to stay in bed until almost an hour after sunrise! I’m really glad to be getting up earlier again!

I was going to go have Thanksgiving dinner at the gallery, but I think I’m going to skip it and get more work done. I have more commissions than I have time right now. I’m also planning to do one more show at the gallery at least and then I’m trying to get into two more locations around town where the market is a bit more upscale. There’ll be plenty of fees to knock my take-home pay back down, but it’s nice to have more professional people to work with.
The recent art:

The Runner – commissioned
Acrylic on Plywood
About 36″x23″

As Above, So Below
Acrylic on Plywood
About 10.5″x12″
$85
(This was a chameleon painting, but no one bought it and I was tired of holding on to it)

Koi Over Stained Glass
Acrylic on Canvas
16″x20″
$135

Seren’s really enjoying our time at the easel these days and continuously explores my paint drawers, throwing tubes on the floor which we take breaks from painting to count as I put them back in the drawers.
She shows me when she finds particularly good tubes and is trying to grab the brush now. It’s almost time to start working with her – collaborating on some pieces.

I am trying to practice zen parenting. I can’t make things different than they are… but my choices are to either go with the flow and work with what I have or to be miserable struggling with the situation.  Life is exceptionally busy as paintings are selling (and must be painted) fast and she’s getting bigger and stronger every day.

I’m just glad you can’t see my hair or smell my breath from the other side of the monitor.
Onward and upward
*

My husband’s fine craftsmanship – black soapstone and bamboo.  Sealed with bees wax.  He’s smoked a pipe longer than I’ve known him and, like me, can’t use anything without thinking of other ways it could be made. These are available for purchase and range from 60$ – 90$. 
Very durable and highly functional. 

Home alone with 25 pound squirming wild primate baby.
Tasked with photographing set of pipes my husband made.

It felt like one of those brain teaser things from middle school.  Neither baby nor box of pipes nor camera could be left unattended outside.

Baby cannot be left unattended inside or outside at this particular point in time.

Pipes and camera are attractive to Tiny McGrabHands and semi-fragile.

It’s cold outside.

Solution? Baby chair goes out, Baby, camera, and pipes all go out at once. This requires opening the door and closing it with my toes.  Yeah. I’m slick like that. Thankful for all those years of yoga hahaha…

Baby goes into little chair and I dangle arugula in front of her until she takes the bait.

Pose and photograph pipes while keeping one eye on baby.

Carry baby, pipes, and camera back in…

Again, opening and closing door with toes. In case you were wondering, I am right food dominant. Kind of interesting.

If you use your foots for hand-like tasks, do you have the same side dominant hand and foot?

I don’t know if this link will work, but I’m kind of proud of the shots I got while wrangling all that stuff. It may sound simple and silly, but it was kind of stressful and tough to accomplish with little room for error and lots of delicate items.

Link?

I have paintings coming out my ears. The faster they sell, the faster I paint. I have to produce for the next show and the deadline is in less than two weeks and I have three commissioned paintings that are due as soon as I can finish them and I have a couple other commissions that may or may not come through and I have all these damned ideas swirling around in my head trying to come out the ends of my arms and right now just this very moment, there’s a chunk of tiny human laying across my legs sleeping.

And then I decided to work on that book I started a while back… and I’m due to write this essay on women’s roles in “today’s world” whatever the hell that means… and I have to finish editing/proofing this book of my friend’s and then he invited me to write an editor’s note and I’d be a damned fool not to do that…

And then I decided that I’d take part in the public art project putting murals up in this alley close to Market Square in Knoxville because I totally don’t have enough to get done already and every 8 month old wants to ride around in a baby sling carrier while her mother paints on some wall with recycling center paint on a chilly day… but it’s a great opportunity to put some stuff up where people will see it all the time and it’s just cool and maybe I can get a photographer to come and play with me while I paint…

And then there’s the small matter of the web design projects I really ought to do…

Yeah.
And here I sit performing my role as baby bed. She just doesn’t like to be away from me very much and I find it pointless and inefficient to try to convince her otherwise.

Really nice thing happened yesterday. I was carrying a pile of packages to the post office and had this idea that I would strap them to the baby stroller and strap the baby to my chest in the baby carrier and somehow get all the stuff into the building and shipped.
Sounds ridiculous right? Yeah. It was.  No way were those packages going on that little stroller.  So there I stood in the parking lot with the packages on the ground and the baby in the car seat looking at me like “what the h… I’m supposed to be getting out of this seat now.  What are you doing?” and just then. Out of nowhere, appears this bored guy who was paying enough attention to the world to happen to notice my predicament. He actually carried all my packages in for me and saved me a lot of time and probably a few bruises.
YAY

So every time I feel like I’ve gotten myself into some silly pile of unaccomplishable work, something like that happens and reminds me that I’m not in it alone… and everything’s on time.

Onward and upward
*

I know this is all I ever seem to say, but life is insane and amazing. We’re really getting things together at the house – the remodel is making progress and I’m still selling paintings which is always a relief.  Art business can come and go with the weather.  I’m planning another show for First Friday December. I don’t usually show this frequently, but I have an opportunity that is not to be passed up and it is a lot of fun.  It’s also totally unknowable as to how long the little one will be cool with going to work with me like that. 

Husband and I rearranged a lot of the living space today to make more space for S as she gets more determined to walk about (still with help) and squirm all over the place.

Also… I can share with you… a bit of video I did for a documentary. I don’t know when it’ll come out and I owe the guy a essay already… but I thought some of you might be amused to see me like… moving around and stuff. Don’t feel like you’ll hurt my feelings if you don’t watch it…
http://youtu.be/gGi88A2KznA