It’s been a while, Crocodile…

Liechtenstein - Was it a fever dream..?

It’s a funny thing when you’re self motivated. You think to yourself. “I'll just miss this week as I've got to get this done”, or get caught up in doing something else and then suddenly that thing you wanted to do regularly hasn’t happened in months. Welcome back blog. 

To be fair I have been busy, I’ve been branching out into live painting with some very lovely and patient subjects. We had Easter break here so I've been spending lots of time with my children, and have been enjoying the final few weeks with the lovely husband before he disappears again for months on end. Excuses, excuses..but actually this is an important point to remember, that we all have lives and not all of it is easily shareable. 

I’ve been trying to be more comfortable with sharing me on socials because it’s important, not only do I happen to know lots of you in person and want to try and share some of my life with you from far away, but because some of you don’t know me and I'd like you to. I was at uni in the early days of Facebook, which means my internet history is littered with strange, telling statuses of angst and albums of blurred pictures. I learned not to feel safe exposing my soul on the internet (a good lesson) but one which doesn’t help when I'm trying to share my art. Art is a part of my soul. If I can’t risk being an idiot, then I can’t share the good stuff too, and this is a hard lesson I'm learning.

One thing you might notice if you follow me on Instagram is that I don’t share identifiable photos of my kids. This is especially weird as I regularly paint them and share the paintings! I consider those two separate things, one is them, and one is my view of them. I made a decision very early on that I didn’t want to share their images publicly, (a decision which aged better than some others). I wanted them to be able to have some say in what was posted or not, a concept I explored more with some of their portraits where we worked together on them like “Worrier” and “the Dreamer”. However I still don’t like sharing their photos, which means I can’t share 95% of my camera roll.

Over Easter we toured around the alps, a major plus point of moving to central Europe is how much more achievable all of these things are. I saw expansive mountain ranges, beautiful and extensive orchards (Italy grows a lot of apples..) and freezing cold snow caps. It was wonderful and if I identified more as a landscape artist probably would be very fruitful for my art. We shall see if any of it seeps in over the next few years. 

Now I’m home and there’s time again to create and share, hopefully I’ll find the time and patience with myself to do it. Wish me luck!