If an artist paints in the forest and nobody sees...




Despite the fact that I consider myself a writer who paints and a painter who writes, I haven't done much of either for a while.  So, I've decided to simply write "something" and hope that it will break the writers block, the painters perturbation. Have you ever felt like a mailbox whose owner has been on vacation ~ stuffed? It's not that I don't have anything to say or paint, it's that I have too much!!!

I may, at some point, talk about being married as a teenager, raising a family, losing a husband of 47 years and who, independent of those life events, I am. Like many of you, I'm still climbing out of the rubble of the last year of politics and pandemic, a year in which I moved to a new home, had my groceries delivered weekly and visited my friends on patios and porches even in the heat and cold. 

So, yes, I am a survivor as are most of you.  And, facing the fourth surge of Covid-19, I am just as uncertain what the near future may bring, let alone what the next election cycle will do to this terribly fractured country (and yes, it IS only months away...sigh.) My mother had a plaque in her kitchen that read, "Better get it all together before it all comes apart!"  Despite the fact that it sounds like a bad country song, this proverb is an apt warning to take nothing for granted, to do the difficult work of soul-care and to not waste another minute in ennui.  

I have recently archived about a hundred alcohol ink paintings:  labeling, placing in a protective sleeve, alphabetizing and filing each.  It was a messy, exhausting, almost painful process, digging through drawers filled with paintings, reclaiming and rediscovering them.  Messy, because my studio was inundated for days with stacks of alcohol inks on every surface.  Exhausting, mentally and physically, bent over drawers and file cabinets for long hours. Painfully sad, because I was struck afresh at the power and importance (at least to ME) of the body of work I was sifting through and stowing.  I have  rediscovered the beauty and weightiness of some of it, most of it, and I want to share it with others, feeling like a failure for not having communicated this well enough. I, a writer, haven't done enough to tell people about my work.  I will endeavor to do so in this blog.  
  
Wandering Heart

 





   

 

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