It has been a year!

It has been a year since I started Tamarak’s Table…so…what have I learned from this?...

I originally started this blog so that I would have a space where I could put my stuff while I was participating in Leah’s Art Every Day month, which was November 2008…I have signed up for it again and am looking forward to it…the extra push it gives me…allowing myself to spend more time in the studio…

I have grown a lot through blogging and have gained some valuable insights and learning tools from it…it has really just been this past year that I have pushed myself to ‘put myself out there’…that was a big step for me and the blog was one of the ways through which I did this…

My posting track record has been irregular…no schedule, rhyme or reason...I posted when I could…usually I had much more to say, more entries that I would have liked to have made, than I had time to do it in…it takes me a while to get a post ready to upload…maybe I should post little bits more often…but I seem to like having a complete package of some sort before I post…it is different during the CED month…during that I am supposed to be tracking my daily creative activity…so little snippets are what is in order…

While I would love to be able to spend time every day painting, that isn’t possible…other life responsibilities are such that, at this point in my life, daily ‘studio time’ is still on my wish list…but that doesn’t mean I don’t have creativity in my life daily…I think I do…a lot of it still happens in my head though…

This blog has been my space where I take a longer, more structured look at my creativity…to look at my processes, my inspirations, my development…I didn’t know, when I started blogging just what it would give back to me…I have always thought about what I do creatively – whether it was my writing or my painting…I have always tried to step back and think about what I do…but I had never written about it…never photographed, written and then edited what I photographed and wrote about it to the point where I would put it out into a public place…about my creations, about my processes…about how I got to where I was, what inspired me along the way…not as a whole package, anyway…about 4 years ago Cariño and I did the Artist’s Way book in a group…that got me thinking about my processes and the ways in which I keep myself inspired…but, except for a very few people, I was still keeping all my ‘stuff’ private…

There were a few things that came together, all at the right time, which got me to step into the public realm…I had started painting in 2006…after one of my clients told me just to ‘do it’…each year I was painting more and more…and at some point in 2007 I started thinking that I might have to find a way to start selling my paintings so that I could buy more supplies (and make more space)…but it wasn’t until 2008 that I challenged myself to ‘put myself out there’…a huge and terrifying step…but a wonderful one as well…

This has been a great year for growth…for self examination and for stepping back and looking at what, how and why I do what I do…it has also opened a new channel of communication for me…got me back in touch with some old friends and opened up a new world full of fellow creative people…thank you all for your comments and support…I look forward to this next year with excitement about where it will take me from here…