it’s officially summer now and thankfully my pet schedule has slowed down some. i was away for 3 weeks on an overnight pet sit so unable to spend any time in my studio, but now that i’m back i’m having a hard time getting going again. while i was away all i wanted to do was paint, because of course i couldn’t. but now that i’m back and i can, i’m finding every excuse to not go in there.
cvp 2025 is almost over. due to the long pet sit, i kinda checked out of the course when everyone was starting their final series. since i couldn’t really start mine, i just decided to not watch any of the zoom calls or videos and just wait until i could do it all together when i have the time. but i haven’t gone back yet to it. next tuesday will be our final zoom call. i guess i’ll tune in but it will feel weird not having completed or even started the final series or several weeks of lessons.
i kinda pooped out at the exact same point i did last year, though last year i did at least start my final series and give it a go. i just got lost midway through it, in the messy middle, and never found my way out of it and ended up abandoning the panels. i’ve been thinking it might be good to go back to those panels and see if the time away gives me new perspective or interest in continuing on them. i just have to remember how i mixed the colors i used on them!!
oh well. at least cvp was free for me this year. thanks again to the three folks who signed up using my links, as you paid for my class this year and helped me pay off my mechanic bill for my car… just in time for me to take it back in again! but seriously, i do hope cvp was everything you hoped it would be when you signed up and that you had a positive experience. despite my kvetching, i’m still glad i took it again and am still hopeful i will buckle down and go back to the lessons i didn’t get through, do everything, in the months ahead. i signed up for the redux fb group – all the folks who fell behind and want to go back through the course together while we still have access made a fb group. i hope i follow through.
i haven’t decided if i will sign up for the academy for a few months again this year. the academy is a paid monthly subscription for those who’ve taken cvp and it’s only open one time a year, when cvp ends. i have a few weeks to decide. last year i signed up on a monthly basis – you can do a monthly or yearly subscription – but had to quit after a few months because i just couldn’t justify the cost. but it has a lot to offer, including the 24/7 zoom room called the studio plus monthly interviews with artists, masterclasses on process and many business aspects of being an artist, plus continued access to the art2life community of artists and coaches. i liked it a lot but i do feel like it’s a bit overpriced and it’s hard to afford when you don’t make a lot of money.
outside of all this art2life/cvp stuff, i’ve been daydreaming and brainstorming with a few friends about how to find a studio space that we could co-op together, not just for our own individual art practices, but where we could do monthly gatherings for folks to come paint/create together. i’m not really interested in being a teacher, per se, but with all these classes i’ve taken i have a lot of exercises that i found helpful that would be fun prompts to share with friends. kind of an open creativity studio time, as a social but also a fun creative thing. but i don’t have space to do that at home and no one i know really does. wouldn’t it be cool to find a space big enough that we could collectively rent and use, and host events like that? a girl can dream. guess i need to put that on my vision board.
kolaj fest is happening this week around town and i’m vaguely interested in some of that program, but due to work obligations probably won’t make it. i have a two night overnight sit that i booked months ago for one of my regular clients. thankfully i only have one other overnight booked all summer and i’m not taking any more for the foreseeable future. i need to get back to my art practice and scheming ways to make money from my creativity again, so i don’t have to take on all the petsitting that comes my way. cuz i’m old and tired, burnt out on that work, and all i ever think about is making stuff.
this is a rambling post that doesn’t say a lot but i wanted to make an update. if you are reading this, you are seeing a new theme for my wordpress website here; not sure it’s the final choice but i keep testing out new themes that are more compatible with woo commerce so i can have an online store. i’m still configuring and populating the store and tweaking the site, though, so things are likely to keep changing for a while until i get it all right. at least i think this theme makes reading the site easier on the eyes.
i guess that’s all for now. more when i have something concrete to say. just wanted to pop in and say hi. as always, check my instagram for more recent photos of whatever i do manage to do in the studio. (the photo at the top of this post is part of a large panel i’ve been working on and off again for more than a year. i’ve since painted over many of these parts but i thought it was a fun crop of an in-process piece.)