Blog

Five nights a week, I sit with my laptop on my lap [go figure] and wonder what I will write about for my blog. I almost never have a preconceived notion. I do have a short list of ideas to look at if I get stuck on what I should discuss with my blog readers. Usually, I don’t have to look at it because I just start writing. However, on Saturday night, I entertained the thought that maybe I should cut back on my writing and focus instead on sketching during my regular writing time of the day. A recent blog that I read suggested that writing about art could be detrimental to your art career because it takes away precious art creation time. It occurred to me on Saturday night that since I don’t have a huge audience that reads my blogs, maybe it wouldn’t be noticed if I cut back on my writing. I know that I will never be a great writer, because writing is not one of my best skills, so maybe I shouldn’t be concentrating on writing five nights a week. Nonetheless, I think that writing helps my art. Talking about my artwork has always been very hard for me. At art shows it is especially hard for me. I feel completely tongue-tied because I don’t want to come across as conceited or a braggart when I talk about my art or my art process. Writing lets me practice discussing what I feel about art and how art has affected my life.

Feeding time is the oil painting still life that I talked about in my blog, Completion. Since it was time for a change I made it my home page piece.  It is very simple in design compared to some of my trompe l’oeil or still life pieces. This painting is about nurturing.

I have always been a nurturing person. Taking care of plants was the first outlet that bore the brunt of my nurturing nature. A purple passion plant was on my glass-topped desk in my childhood bedroom since as far back as I can remember. [That desk is now in my studio.] Taking cuttings and divisions to start new plants of whatever I grew was how filled my childhood bedroom with plants. Watering, pruning, dividing and transplanting cultivated the horticulturist in little me. When my children were small, I would take leaves from my African violets and plant them in Styrofoam egg cartons that I had modified. Poking holes in the bottoms of the egg cartons for drainage, filling them with soil and setting them on the cutoff carton lids was the way I could start lots of babies for little cost. Our home was filled with the flowers of African violets when my children were little. When we bought our home, it didn’t have the best light for African violets, so they got supplanted with outdoor flower gardens. 

We had looked at houses for seven years before we finally decided on which one to buy. We had asked and received permission to plant gardens in the yard of the house that we rented for five years before we bought our home. When we bought our home, we didn’t have a lot of extra money but we did have the ability to work hard. We started perennial gardens all around our new home by transplanting divisions of the plants from the gardens at our rental house.  Now, most of our yard is taken up with gardens that are edged with little stone fences that my husband constructed. 

The nurturing of anything takes a great deal of work. Nurturing for me started out with growing plants. It moved on to include pets, a knowledge of science, then my children, an art career, science students, and hopefully children of all ages, someday, with my children’s books. In this painting, it is time to feed the orchid to make it grow and flourish. Are you nurturing your art career to make sure that it grows and flourishes, as well?