Enjoying Being Back in Our Happy Place

 

Seventeen months have passed. Today I sit in a recliner in our new bedroom looking out on our beautiful back pond--the feature that sold us on this property 37 years ago. I marvel at the Douglas firs, azaleas, pink dogwood, and rhododendrons that survived the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire. What didn't survive was the house and garage full of our acquisitions of 50 plus years of marriage. It turns out we can live without those things. We now look forward to the next chapter I will title "Back in our Happy Place." After all, it is the property, the community, the rural beauty that we are forever attached to.

I am curious what this next chapter will mean for my art. For the last 17 months I have been creating most of my art on my lap, or small table. And most of it has been fire related. 

Now in my studio I have a wonderful space to do big art again--full sheets of watercolor paper, 30" by 22" have always been my favored size. I know I still have lots of things to say about the fire that raged through the McKenzie Valley. I feel an urge to go more abstract, so I am starting to use paint rather than pen and ink. I'm interested to see how that's going to work out.

There is still much to do to organize my new space. There are piles of paintings that I have to sort through and decide what to save, what to rework, what to offer out to the world again. 

But moving in and organizing has been put aside long enough here and there to give a try and applying paint to paper again. I am still using black and white with limited color. Here you see my starts and two pieces I played with enough to call done. As always, a mat helps formalize the art.

Starts