The Dead of Winter

After the storm comes the sun.
This has been a wicked winter so far for most of the country and for those of us in New England it is more of the same.
Cold and sometimes white. And then blazingly bright, clean and beautiful.

Good time for dreaming, cleaning, pondering and re-organizing thoughts, spaces and logistics.
Great time for asking yourself questions about what your next step might be.
Excellent time to open your mind up to the Muse who whispers ideas and flashes pictures in your mind.

I am whittling away at the past and carving out a clearing for the future. Great tasks for winter.

Inch by Inch

I've spent about 6 to 8 hours going through decades of Art Mags. Looking through them and finding that half of them were gems and I have  a big pile of discards.

Lots of styles of painting that attract me and many that repel. Some good information in some of the articles. Always liked to see work in progress telling me a story of how the artist got to where they wanted to go.

Nice to see some of the artists are still painting today. Sad to see the ones in the articles that have passed away. Some of those magazines are OLD. They did not have Dot.com addresses, there were no digital images in use yet. Old school mags with old school methods.

Next up on my agenda organizing all the books and mags so I can actually use them thoughtfully when I need to reference something I have a question about.

So much waiting to be tackled. This is my journal of new beginnings.

It Begins

January 2014

I skipped the whole year of 2013. It was not a "bad" year, it was a different year.
It was a year of great changes, of endings and beginnings. The beginnings have been good ones.

We lost our beloved Dalmatian, Lizzie. We gained 3 adopted kittens who help fill the void. I have a great niece I spend a couple of days a week with. She is a toddler now and she fills up a huge part of my heart.

The studio became the kitten nursery. My website was taken down and my materials put away. The day to day of my life took on a different pattern in 2013 with Lizzie becoming increasingly frail and routines caring for her and others, more intense. The drive to create artwork just took to the shelf.

What is interesting to me is that for being such an integral part of my being, it was relatively easy to set it aside. That means no thinking about art, dreaming about painting, reading about art, looking at art or being inspired by my Muse who has always been a chatter box in my ear. Filling me with ideas for paintings that sometimes I could just not keep up with.

So what has changed? The new routines with the kittens has stabilized. They are wonderful spirits who do not know how they will come to inspire me. Maxwell and his two sisters Cami and Ella are nine months old now and they just fit expertly into our home and life.
I have a pretty regular schedule with helping care for my great niece so now it is easy to work around that.
Most importantly...I am being drawn back into a creative frame of mind that is pulling me to the center once again. I have had some flashes of ideas for painting, I can start to hear a hum of chatter in the background of myself...the Muse is waking. She has had a long enough vacation from me I guess.

It is starting slowly and building up. I feel it.

We begin. I have a long path to walk but I am in no hurry at the moment. I am letting the waves wash over me and I will see each step back on this path to center as a meditative process, with awareness and appreciation. I think it is a good start.