well as usual i have not kept up with this website/blog. november flew by and now we are almost at mid-december. the “find your joy” class is over and i even managed to do an open studio this past weekend which i didn’t even bother to promote here. i’m not gonna go back and recap any of it – if you want to know how the rest of the class went or about my open studio, just check my art instagram page cuz it’s the only thing i can remember to update regularly.

(but i will offer this photo i took which was part of the last assignment in the class, to hang/lay out all the work we did so we could be surrounded by our abundant creativity and feel the accomplishment of having made so many pieces of art in 3 months time. i did manage to sell some of this work at my open studio!)

i’m about to enter the busiest few weeks of pet biz work i can remember in my 13 years of business, so i won’t be painting again probably until the new year when holiday madness is over. mardi gras is early this year so we’ll have a pretty truncated carnival season so not sure how much i’ll be able to accomplish in january/early february but i hope to keep my art practice going consistently-ish. i started out last year tracking how many days i spent in the studio each month but i think i’ve come to peace with the fact that it’s going to ebb and flow with the demands of my pet business and the social calendar of new orleans, so every day is not really reasonable but “regularly” like several days a week, even if it just means grabbing 20 minutes here or there, is still a success. but i will endeavor to keep tipping the scales in favor of spending more time on art and less time on pets and maybe some year i’ll be able to make the jump to just doing pets part time and doing art more full time. it’s a delicate dance of needing to keep making enough money to survive (pet biz) while wanting to paint enough to create things that might actually also make me money eventually but also wanting to keep following the momentum of all that i learned in the class. i guess we’ll see how it goes!

anyway. happy holidays to all who celebrate, whatever you celebrate. and here’s to a new year!