It has been a looooong time! I almost forgot how to do a blog post! Plus, I think the admin layout has changed…or maybe it has just been that long.

This past year was rough. I had to come to terms with some things–the biggest one being that my daughter is on the Autism Spectrum. I had thought I was doing good at first, but I guess these things need to happen in their own time. Maybe I still needed to go through all the steps of grieving, but at any rate I am at last able to look past the autism and move on.

I had not intended to pull away from people so completely and did not realize how hard it would be to rejoin the world, so to speak, once I was ready. I also didn’t realize how much a part of me my art was. I did not paint for nearly a year and it made me feel like half a person. When people asked me what I did I would still reply with “I am an artist.” and then I would feel guilty that I wasn’t painting. But it seemed to be a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Did I not feel good because I wasn’t painting? Or was I not painting because I did not feel good? I thought that getting back to painting would help me, but every painting I tried was “off” and just seemed to perpetuate how negative I felt. I had to be in the right place mentally to paint. I had to be ready to paint again. I am now ready to paint again.

I took advantage of my studio day and the gorgeous weather this week and spent three hours painting at the Leighton Centre. I started with a watercolour sketch and a small cloud study to shake out the cobwebs.

Then I did two larger landscapes–one facing west where the mountains were clearly defined and one facing south where the mountains were hazy. The second one started out as more of a cloud study, but then I ended up filling in the rest of the landscape and playing with colour a bit more.

I just made it to my daughters school in time to pick her up at 3:30 with paint covered hands, where she informed me that the next time I go out landscape painting I have to take her along too.