First Post of a New Season

I haven’t posted since April, and so much has happened in the past six months, I hardly know how to catch everyone up! When I go about making life changes, I don’t know when to stop. Let me start by giving a quick synopsis of all the personal life changes, and then we’ll get into the art, which is what my blog is about – my art.
I’ll be brief with the personal: in the past six months, I have gotten divorced, remarried, started a new job, purchased a new car, and moved to a new house. I even have a new cell phone. Nothing in my life is very familiar yet. Except thank God I have my daughter who has bravely weathered all these changes with me and is enjoying this new life we have. As a senior in high school she’s changing as well. So much is new that it’s overwhelming and sometimes frightening.
That brings me to my art. All my life changes have naturally led me to pare down, purge, and simplify my massive collection of art supplies. I have written several times about my being completely overwhelmed when I sat down to create because I didn’t know where to begin or what media to use. I would dabble in all of it and end up creating a never-ending supply of unfinished projects. Then I would have to deal with the guilt of not finishing anything. Very frustrating. In the midst of moving in with my husband, which thankfully I was able to do slowly and thoughtfully as I moved in over a period of about two months, I ran across this blog post…
http://seawindbt.com/rainy/blog/2013/02/26/art-supplies-maybe-less-is-better/
and this one…
http://kellykilmer.blogspot.com/2013/02/journaling-having-too-much-stuff-or.html
I printed these off on 5/31/2013 and pondered and read them (meditated on them maybe) for some time. And in the midst of moving, I finally did it. I sold a whole carful of art supplies to Penney Klaproth for $500. It felt like she had done me the BIGGEST favor EVER! I felt so free and unencumbered. (You MUST visit her blog! I feel so incredibly blessed to have her living nearby and working right here in my town! This woman is wildly talented and she’s been published in several magazines – and I KNOW her!!! Just think she will be creating with some of “my” supplies.)
In addition to selling all those supplies, I gave my newly acquired sewing machine to my best friend. It was too much frustration for me. I want immediate results, like you get with a pencil or a brush. Threading and maintaining a sewing machine was WAY TOO TEDIOUS for this impatient artist. I am proud that I taught myself to sew and I needed to do that in order to know that it is just not my thing.
So gone are my sewing machine, thread and sewing supplies, all my fabric, acrylic paints, easel, acrylic brushes. I even gave up most of my magazine collection and several books. I felt like I had inspiration overload with so much!
I narrowed down my stash to the bare essentials. My narrowed focus now – watercolor; colored pencil; and journaling supplies, such as pens, markers, Inktense pencils, acrylic ink, etc.

Click on the following link for some sketches and journal pages that I’ve done over the past six months. With the new job and all the major changes, I haven't been quite as prolific, but it sure is a good life these days and I love my new sunroom studio.

May - October 2013 paintings and journal pages