Art is Life/ Life is Art

Do any of you feel like your right brain gets in the way of normal life? I float about three feet above the ground almost all of the time- never quite grounded- looking at all the inspiration around me and daydreaming a lot of the time about what art I will make next.

This doesn't work well with:
A- Driving
B-Walking
C- Paying attention to all the other stuff of the world,
Sooooo- I tend to do not-in-the-moment things quite a bit, and it gets me in trouble.

Yesterday, my big ditz move was losing my box of paints. Now, how can an artist lose her paints, you ask? Well, I set it down, after my weekly drawing and painting class, while I was cleaning up the water that I spilled, which I was pouring down the water fountain drain, (of course!) I must have left it on the table there, and went on my merry way, so now I am am paintless (at least ACRYLIC paintless). I am praying that they are safely in the lost and found, or I will have to replace all of my cadmiums, cobalt blue and all of the others-you know, all of the *expensive* ones.

I haven't updated my blog in a while, so I have a lot of new things to upload here. Here is a drawing that I just completed this morning in my sketchbook:

I have been working a lot on my breastplates pieces, and I attended a preview of our show this past Thursday evening, which was wonderful.

We showed our preliminary work, and a few completed pieces for the Fall Breastplates show, at a mixer for a national conference for healthcare educators, called Cancer and Cultural Literacy.

I met some fascinating people at this event, who were very interested in our pieces, and I helped Kathy facilitate an interactive piece that she is working on called "Wardrobe of Heroic Proportions," where attendees could add to the piece that she is creating, which will later be sewn into an oversized kimono.

There were groups at the conference who target cancer education in diverse communities here in the US- Amish, Mennonite and Haitian, for example. I found it interesting to walk around and read about the different approaches that are taken with the needs in mind of each group.

This made me know, even more, that I have followed a good path here for myself. Getting to know Kathy has been great, and it has opened up a lot of doors for me that feel so right.

I also got to spend the evening with Janet Aponte, a fellow artist who will be exhibiting in the Breastplates event.

I found out, a few days after my mother passed away, that the nurse who attended mom that night and who helped us through everything was Janet Aponte! I had never met her before night my mom died, and I had no idea that she was an artist.

After sharing such a profound experience on the night of my mom's transition, I was almost in disbelief when I found out that she was one of the other eight artists chosen for the Breastplates show.

There just aren't any coincidences, you know? Just another amazing thing that has happened to me in my amazing life. I am so blessed to be able to be an artist. So maybe that right brain thing isn't all bad....

Here is an update on "Healing Light," one of the paintings I am doing for the Breastplates and Other Artful Armor Against Cancer show that will kick off at Lee Moffit Cancer Center in Tampa this coming October. I have warmed up some of the tones in the painting, but need to make it a lot lighter. I'd do it today if I didn't lose my paints!!!

The other two are smaller paintings, done in my Moleskine sketchbook- "Spring Barn" and "Portrait of Hedwig", both in acrylic paints on paper.