Life as an Artist: Activities and Current Directions

Between my work as a piano teacher and language tutor, recent festivals in the past few weeks, and an up-coming one-woman show in downtown Huntsville, I have been traveling all around my area lately. My myriad paintings and set-up materials have been organized based on what needs to go where and when. Some may ask whether I am not too busy to be thinking of new art, but I do not feel that way. I get fairly sleepy by the end of the day, naturally, but I feel energized, enthusiastic. Moreover, I find myself doing multiple sketches per day, sometimes even doing in-depth studies of sketches or illustrations I find in books, magazines, or on the internet (I remain fond of vintage pin-up art, particularly the work of Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren, as well as Art Nouveau images by Alphonse Mucha, whose graceful pencil line is a wonder of the world to me). Suddenly, I want to make paintings that require me to do much more research and preliminary work than I am used to doing before putting brush to canvas. . . and I want to finally do another series of works meant to be shown together. (I have not done a conscious "series" since the paintings of Birds that I did for my first show in 2007). My ideas have already reached the "preparation stages", in fact.

Even so, I do not want to go much further until I have finished the three paintings I have been working on simultaneously these days. The smallest one (8X10), Charleston Ruffles [above] I finished yesterday. The other two, of course, are much larger and have taken their time drying in the humid Alabama summertime, but they too shall soon be completed and varnished.