Happy New Year!!!…back to reality after the holidays!

Well…here it is January 11, 2009! Christmas visiting and holidays ended up spilling into the New Year by quite a bit! It has been a really fun time though…we had some Christmas time spent with family and friends in and around Ottawa; some of it was with just Cariño, me and the girls. Then, on New Years Day, after a wonderful New Years Eve feast at home with Cariño, the girls, elder’s beau and a couple of younger’s friends, we headed down to the Toronto area to visit and stay with friends and family there. We got back to Ottawa late on the 5th with my bro who came to visit for a few days…I just got back yesterday from taking him to our Dad’s to carry on with his visiting. I came back to rejoin my reality here! I have managed to do a bit of painting over the past holiday days, but not much...I have had fun with all the visiting though…so all is good! Cariño and I even managed a wee bit of quiet time just the two of us on New Years Eve when we brought in the New Year with some bubbly and oj – the kids having all moved on to parties of their own!

I am looking forward to concentrating on finding a balance between work and painting. I do enjoy the work I do, but it isn’t a passion, and it can get pretty stressful at times for a number of reasons. Due to the nature of my job as a computer technician, I usually only get calls in times of emergencies and sometimes those emergencies don’t end nicely and some people take this better than others. Being self employed in a 'break/fix' job, it always seems to be feast or famine and I have little control over my workload and that can be stressful at times. Painting, on the other hand, is pure therapy for me. I get totally lost in it and come out feeling refreshed and renewed. Unfortunately, so far, the computer work pays and the painting doesn’t, hence the need to find the balance!

I read on Leah’s Creative Everyday blog about choosing a word to be the theme for your year. This, instead of making New Years resolutions, which I never really did anyway, but I liked the idea of a theme word. So I have chosen ‘challenge’ as my theme word for 2009. Not only is my life seemingly full of challenges at times, I also want to challenge myself in a number of ways – most notably in my creative endeavors.

It seems that I had already started down this path last year…challenging myself more and more as the year progressed. So it happens that I start this year with a few deadlines and upcoming events already in place…and challenges they are! In February, as I have already talked about here, I have a solo show at Heartwood House in their gallery and in April another solo show at the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa. Added to those shows I have three juried things that I am going to submit to: the Ottawa School of Art Boutique (deadline coming up very fast on January 14th and 15th), the Foyer Gallery Artists’ Association (deadline Jan 31st) and at the Cube Gallery I would like to get accepted into the Great Big Smalls V show for next December and the deadline for that is February 6th, there might be some other shows at the Cube Gallery that I will want to try to get in on as well…I haven’t had a really good read of the other ones yet. So I am starting out the year with lots of challenges! I am going to keep challenging myself to actively pursue getting into more shows, more galleries…work on getting my paintings ‘out there’.

It is a scary thing putting your work out there to be judged and looked at…that alone has been a big step for me this past year…maybe it gets easier? I guess I will find out! It would be great if some of my paintings sold (I have sold two so far)…I keep painting them and enjoying the process and the learning…