Old But Gold

Some of you will know what a pleasure it is to move your family across several provinces (or states). My husband works as a dentist for the military and we were posted over the summer to northern Ontario. He and I have been actively unpacking and organizing for months and still we are coming across things we'd forgotten about. I'm only now finding peace and organization in my new studio, but only because we spent hours going through boxes and containers full of paperwork, and art supplies and scraps and paintings and drawings and sketchbooks and reference books and and and...

I have a love/hate relationship with organization and too often find myself and my work desk buried in the paraphernalia of an artist. I like to think that we artists specialize in chaos. Although I religiously follow artists like Natalie Malan, and Yao Cheng (my HEROES of life), and everything in their world seems to pristine, so calm, so clean, so organized, so.....white! HOW? How the heck?? I'm going to go ahead and assume that their lives are just as chaotic as mind to make myself feel better. Literally as I wrote that sentence, my oldest son sauntered into the studio, his face and hands covered in Nutella, like it was no big thing. This mom's life is real, folks.

Anyway, so while I've spent hours making sense of this work space, I've loved coming across old projects, sketchbooks full of unused ideas, and bits of paper with watercolored stems and blossoms, just waiting to be scanned and edited. I love gauging my growth as an artist and entrepreneur. Some of those old ideas are golden. Others are laughable but lead me to other great things and I'm grateful for all of them.

I guess the benefit of being regularly displaced is the opportunity to review; expand upon old gems and remember past mistakes to change for the better.