Art Plunge

 I learned early on you don't always get what you want in life. You can circle as many things as you want on a Toys R Us Christmas mailer and get zero of those things. You can wish for a Lite Brite year after year and be 45 years old and still not have one. This is life. Not supposed to be fair. Not supposed to be used to just given things you want. As a result my life was dedicated to what needed to be done and who needed what. Not what I wanted or needed but everyone else. I didn't get the things I wanted so I just thought that's how it was. Everyone else deserved the things. Not me.  I would need new shoes yet buy shoes for others. New jackets for them, worn out spray paint hoodies for me. Treat others to delicious restaurants, find bollweevils in my box of rice at home. Make big holiday meals for the family when I was tired and not feeling festive... and put on my best Pollyanna positive face to serve it and kinda cry inside that the responsibility was always on me to m

  New one in progress Of late I am relishing in the extreme amount of I DONT CARE- ness I feel toward social media social climbing. I don't have giant numbers of "followers". And I don't care. I don't have my ego distorted on the daily as a benefit. The digital world is a whole lot of mirage. And in the art "scene"- a whole lot of silly nothing that goes absolutely nowhere. Case in point... My art has been published- went nowhere. I've been on TV- whoopty whoop- went nowhere. Show in New York- went nowhere. Interviewed and written about- went nowhere. Shown in some top galleries- went nowhere. Been in some of the best curated shows- went nowhere. So a bunch of likes and such on the interwebs- I SHRUG.  None of that matters. Truly connecting, organically ( not buying followers and bots) with real people is going to win out all the time. Whether they buy your work or not ( hopefully they do)- it was REAL ... And in this current world of the Uber fake t

Finally had a few days to decompress from the State Fair and try to recover. What I thought were allergies... Sinus infection. 🤧 Can we say- FUN?!  NOT. SNOT. Half the stuff from the Fair is still in the car. That's how exhausted I was from a month long ordeal of being a "seller", fighting illness and combating endo that was trying to creep up on me. All while juggling a part time job and trying to keep everything stocked and printed and matted and ordered and stuff shipped out. It kicked my butt proper but it was necessary. I'm now back in the "zone" to create and focus on my business... Which was kinda limping around for awhile honestly.  I've got so many ideas and projects in the works it's not funny. I really can't wait for sinus fun to be evicted from my head so I can start it up. Today I return to part time job with my trusty bottle of DayQuil and get back to the grind of life. Bad health stuff has creeped into my friends lives as well and

  Appropriate to my mood I guess it's appropriate to be full on in the gloomy mood of Sorrow- as I work daily with Death in the Dia de Los Muertos exhibition.  My hand paints skulls, death grins and the life that springs forth from it. Death is never just death and the absence of life. It is very much alive in many ways. My recent blogs may seem like absolute bummers and they are- to an extent- but know that I have a healthy relationship with death, depression and healing. There is something comforting in knowing that you are feeling.... And feeling deeply. It's a very amazing gift of being human, although it hurts. How very magical! There are times in life where the trauma makes you feel nothing. I remember having no joy in life for anything and feeling like I was on autopilot as a human. Go to work, act normal, nothing made me happy, nothing made me sad. A complete flatline of feelings. Not a real human. I hated it.  All that was after a trauma of a bad breakup once upon a ti

  Remember to stop and smell the hibiscus... It's Friday and it's been a weird week of pushing emotions to the back burner and front burner all whilst trying to go to work and put on my "public face". Try talking, fielding questions and smiling all day... when all you want to do is lay in a ball all alone in a quiet room and release the floodgate of tears inside you ... It's very exhausting to the spirit.  Today I woke up a little more peaceful about things and am feeling a little more positive.  It helps to think of each death that occurs in our lives as a little seed or cutting- that gets planted in a special garden in our soul. That person now grows in that garden always, it hurts and is hard at first but nurturing it and tending to it helps it grow into a beautiful thing inside you. Forever safe now, no more pain, disease, illness, age... Forever vibrant and safe.  I may sound like a hippie but this is my coping mechanism. I have lots of little spirit plants i

Oh you know, just having an existential meltdown this week for some reason. Some latent leftover trauma from death and a mind trip to being a teen all over again. I thought this was totally abnormal... But after a few Google searches and enlightening articles I see it is perfectly sane to feel the way I am feeling about a sudden loss of someone I hadn't been connected to for 30 years.  Perfectly normal albeit sad. I'm letting myself be sad and watching all the zen talks on sitting with your grief and emotions. It helps a bit. I know time is going to have to fix this. I'm mourning a lot of things, not just my first romance. Why it is deciding to manifest now? Who knows but there's lots of tears. Lots. I didn't even bother with eyeliner today and there's definitely been tears.  Death as usual is a slap in the face to how you're living and I haven't exactly felt connected to the things I want to be connected to. Roberts death brought that home for me. I fee