The holiday season..

Well the holidays were certainly crazy. I had several commissions with a deadline for Christmas - which was exciting and certainly good experience; but more than anything it was encouraging!

While the past year for me has been an evolution of seeing myself as an "artist",

I feel hopeful that the coming year's focus might be the realization that being an artist doesn't mean you have to be poor. 

farm paintings

October's Circle Journal

I received the October Circle Journal from the Blue Frog Legs Group. This month I got Tina's of Rabbit O'Whimsy. Tina used an old Cookbook for her Circle Journal and theme is "Seasons". The journal instructions were simple: find the month that you received the journal and use those pages designated for that month using the SEASON as your inspiration. The sad part was that I loved a couple of the recipes! In fact, I actually made one of them (the Butternut Squash Ravioli). So I decided to TRY to incorporate my paintings into the recipe book rather than cover them up. I didn't have a huge amount of time to play with the journal given the pace of life these days but I managed to do a few things - like integrate a drawing of my Pear Tree (in the front yard) into a Poached Pear recipe. While I'm not supposed to give away all the elements, here is the painting of fall I did:

I sure hope she likes it :)

I started!

So I guilted myself into starting the Sketchbook Project finally. I hate when I feel left behind so I set about doing my cover last night. Of course I chose the theme "Down Your Street" because I LOVE to do architectural drawings and thought I would do a global tour through my eyes. So here is the front cover which I completed last night..just 40 more pages to go! HAHAHAHAH

Sketchbook Project 2010

I really AM stressing out. I've had my sketchbook for over a month now. It sits there in my studio..mocking me. Blank and cold and cream colored. I tortured it a bit the other day - tore a page out of it - and certain I heard it wince. That's what it gets for being blank, uninspiring and uppity. And it has friends in high place too. Happy, gleeful, excited artists who are filling up the pages while mine sit empty and impatient. Oh yes, some of them have even taken their journals apart to reconfigure into something unusual and are now restitching them back together. And frankly..I want to SCREAM! I'm seeing how far behind I am and how uninspired..it's awful!

I went out on a limb and joined in the project and both life and my ADOLSS have gotten the best of me. I can't watch this train leave the station without me! I have to finish this..I have to leave my mark behind. This sketchbook is my scream to the world, "Hey! I'm out here you know!" and if I miss out - well it will have been self-sabotage and that damn sketchbook knows it. I want to be a title in the Brooklyn Art Library..I want to be a book that becomes old and tattered that someday someone flips through only to become curious as to who I was and what I did and where I lived. It's a small piece of immortality (even if only for a time) at a time in my life when I'm not even sure that I'll be missed once I exit the planet.

And then I recalled a poem by Edgar Allen Poe (one of my favorites really) of a raven that mocked him much like my sketchbook. And I thought for a moment that I could glean some insight until I recalled the whole story and remembered that the narrator in the poem actually dies from fright. *sigh* My muse better show up QUICK because there's no way in hell I'm going to die from the fright of a sketchbook.