On vacation

I've spent the last few weeks in Michigan at my Dad's house with my daughters. My husband Howard joined us on Saturday, and now we're having some family time before we head back to Virginia next week.

Results of Saturday's Show

Our show at Artworks didn't get the traffic we'd all hoped for, though Brenda Belfield, who owns the studio, had a great day. The huge thunderstorm that started just as the show was to open probably didn't help turnout, but I think we also need to do a better job of publicity for our next show.

I have not made it into the studio yet this week, the first week the girls are out of school. Monday I ended up taking them shopping, as both needed summer clothes. I'm not even sure what we did on Tuesday. It's a lost day to me. Wednesday I ended up taking them to the theater to see Kung Fu Panda. I didn't see the movie--I walked around Tyson's Corner Mall paying attention to merchandising displays to get ideas for the Judaica shop, and browsing in Barnes and Noble.

My older daughter stayed over at a friend's, so she wasn't here to babysit this morning, so I did housework and shop research until I got her mid-afternoon, then I made a trip to Sam's Club to stock up on some basics. So it's been all Mom and house manager so far this week. Hopefully tomorrow I will get some good time at the studio. I'm working on a seashell painting I'd like to finish before I leave for a month at my father's house in Michigan.

I was hoping to upload a picture for this entry, but they are all still in the camera, and I will need to download them, color correct and crop them, and put them in the right format before they are ready, and that's not happening this evening. But if you want some aesthetic stimulation, go see the website of a woman who makes mezuzahs that I'm planning on carrying in the shop. If you don't know what a mezuzah is, you can read about it on her site as well. Click on her name in the link list on the right, and it will take you to her gallery of 5" mezuzahs, and then you can look around using the buttons on the left.

Friday again? Already?

This week has flown by. Tomorrow afternoon/ evening we're having a show at the studio I paint at (Artworks in Reston, VA). I ended up with FOUR pieces in it, which is quite exciting: two quilts, and two paintings. The show's theme is "Sizzle: Hot Art and Cool Drinks" and my works are all summery. It definitely feels like summer outside, and today was the last day of school, so it's officially summer now to me. The show looks nice up. I hope people come. I have no illusions that I will sell anything, but it will be nice to hear reactions.

Another activity to keep me busy: I've taken responsibility for managing the synagogue's sisterhood Judaica gift shop. I think it will be fun to do, but also a bigger job than I probably realized when I agreed. I have lots of ideas; it will be an issue of time and energy (as always). I would like to get an inventory done before next weekend. Luckily I can get my kids to help.

My older daughter has an end of the year dance this evening and then several friends sleeping over as a late birthday party. I had planned to ride with a friend into DC to go to Artomatic, which it looks like I will manage to miss despite it being open for a month. I am afraid I'm getting sick again, as my sore throat and congestion is back. Everything is basically ready for Libby's party (though we will be kicked out of the living room once they get here). I'm hoping for a good night's sleep and that I will feel okay tomorrow.

TGIF

Yesterday was a very productive day. I had a good day in the studio, finishing a painting for next weekend's show, and also planned menus and did a big grocery shop.

The painting (no photo yet) is of a pitcher of lemonade. The show's title is "Sizzle: Hot art and Cold Drinks", and that made me think of a pitcher of lemonade. So that's what I painted, and thanks to Carolina Seth's suggestion of putting stripes on the straw in the glass, I think it's finished.

I'm still in the process of deciding how to use my day. I need to go to the studio for a few hours, to work on some things, and to clean up my area and put things away before the weekend; but am trying to decide what else to do. I have a list of small things, housework things, and none of them excites me. Part of me wants to run some errands or do some shopping, but I don't know of anything urgent to take care of other than a water filter for the refrigerator (ooh, exciting). I could try taking care of something that's NOT urgent, but I'm so unused to doing that that I can't figure out what that would be. It would be a useful skill for me to learn how to decide what to do based on something OTHER than urgency.

So who am I anyways?

I figured out how to connect Blogger to my site name! A small victory. My blog is showing up at blog.ktsolomon.com, and I managed to put a link to the blog on my homepage. I think there's a link from the blog to the homepage, but I'll have to check on that.

So who am I anyways, and why am I writing this?
I am:
-a painter, originally watercolor, at this moment focusing on acrylics
-a lapsed quilter, originally traditional quilts, then art quilts
-married to a foreign service officer, so I regularly move between countries, but am living in the US now after 10 years overseas
-mother to two daughters, a teen and a tween

I think most of my challenges in life are about managing the balance between home/ parenting with self/ creating. I never seem to have enough energy to do everything I want to do well, so I have to make choices, and I often angst about the choices I make and whether they are the right ones. If I do what I consider to be a good job of running the home and parenting my kids, there's little energy left for me and my art. If I put in hours at the studio, I really can get immersed in my creativity, and then feel the kids and house tasks are inconvenient interferences. I have not found a way to integrate those two aspects of my life. I also have tried working at a paid part-time job the last six months or so, and really couldn't manage balancing THREE things. If I worked hard at the office, I could then go to the studio for a while, but had no energy for home. Or I could do job and home and not art, but that makes me a pretty unpleasant person to be around.

I've given up the paid job now, and I'm hoping that having more time and energy will compensate for losing the income, and that maybe I will be able to get some income from selling my artwork. That would be good, as I do not have enough wall space to hang everything I have made at this point. I'm putting together a website (it's very very small right now), and looking for outlets to show and sell my work. I need to develop the business side of things to make art into my true profession.

At the same time there is a clock running as I know that my time here in the Washington DC area is only temporary. I don't know exactly when, and I don't know to where, but I know that we will move on to a new place, probably on another continent. I know we are here for one more school year, but beyond that nothing is settled.

These are the issues I wrestle with, and what I expect will come up in some form over and over in my blog. Maybe I'm making it too personal, but I guess it will evolve over time, or I can always just delete the whole thing and start over.

First Entry

This is my first effort at a blog, and I have no idea if I'm in the right place doing the right thing. I really wanted it to be connected to my site at www.ktsolomon.com, but even though I use Google Apps for my site, and Blogger is also a Google product, I can't connect them, so I'm using my regular gmail account for this instead. Very confusing.

So why am I starting a blog anyways? Good question, and not sure I have a good answer. I haven't been swept away by most of the blogs I've seen. Maybe I'm too linear, and the reverse structure of blogs confuses me. The newest posts are first, but if the author assumes knowledge of former posts, that means a new reader is lost anyways.

I titled this "An Artist's Musings" because my personal focus right now is on developing my career as an artist. It has taken me a long time to accept that I am an artist, and so I might as well try to do it well. I kept hoping I would discover I was really meant for some normal structured well-paying career, but no luck. I don't know if I will ever earn enough money with art to be "successful" (whatever that means), but I know I won't if I don't even try. And so I am beginning to get my act together, build a body of work, look for show and sales opportunities, etc. This blog is one way of sharing my work with others. Where it will all lead, I'm not sure.