Friday, November 13, 2009

The care and feeding of an artist

Listening to the new Basement Jaxx album, cooking a reminder dinner (as in i forgot to eat) while painting and blogging. I tend to whirlwind. But isn't life a wonderful whirlwind of activity sometimes. It can be so slow for a while and you think "mmm..where has all the action gone?" Only to find that within a short matter of time, it all speeds up again and you think "hey, where has all the time gone?!". I am on the former end of that stick right now, but it is a great gift. It's making me come up with all new ideas and inspirations. I am taking chances with paintings that I once felt timid to, I am re-thinking action plans, and drawing up new ones, and just being content with my home. (Update, I am now listening to the new Yacht album and checking it out...). I have a studio, its where I paint and live with my boyfriend, 20 plants, one fish, and a wonderful gallery of paintings. I love the care and feeding of all of us, paintings included. It is a friday night, and while the world of party and bar hoppers swirls outside my window, I am at home, warm and pleased.

I cleaned my fish tank today, the rocks, the filter on the bio wheel and scrubbed the algae off the sides - the poor fish was so stressed out to see this looming hand come in and out of his home, he excreted something that for a second I thought was his whole intestine! I know that is gross, but you have to understand that this is our second fish: the first one we got at the county fair in indiana with my boyfriend's little boy, Bacchus, and I really worked hard to keep that fish alive. When it died, i cried. I cried over a goldfish! After that incident, we went with Joe's little one to the Old Town Aquarium to buy a new fish, and we picked a beautiful gold fish, which Bacchus named painty, after looking around the room for a minute. So once again, I have taken on the extreme care of this fish, and it looks like the dust has settled on his stress levels tonight and I think he is happy again.

I write this because I have thought a bit about my blog recently, and I realized that I never really write on it, because I don't want to just talk about paintings, I want to talk about my life, my artist's life. And i wasn't sure if this blog was the place to do that. I realize though that it is. Why? Because everything that goes on in my life comes out in my artwork. My artwork is a reflection of all of the internal, all that I feel and think while processing the world I live in. As viewers of my work, I want to share that with you. So you can begin to know more about the work and the artist and the care that goes into it all.
Stay tuned.