Onward to 2025

 Somehow, despite numerous drafts, I never managed to finish any entries in November or this month. It's not that I didn't have anything to share - I just always feel I should embed pictures, otherwise it's boring. And I really didn't have any new art or anything much in the visual realm to share.

In October we went to Illuxcon, and two days after we got home I had an abdominal CT scan. The CT scan was ordered because I had tested positive for a weird and rare kind of tumor - a pheochromocytoma, an adrenal tumor that causes your body to produce extra adrenaline, but is usually non-cancerous - and the only way to start looking for it was with a lengthy CT exam. I had multiple scans with and without contrast, which amounted to about 15 minutes inside the CT machine. Most CT exams only take a minute or less. I've been inside of one a lot this year as we've attempted to figure out what was making me sick.

For years I've had weird blood pressure issues which we eventually attributed to POTS. It's a fancy way of saying that standing up makes my blood pressure plummet and sometimes I faint. Usually I half-faint and hyperventilate, which is very dramatic and upsetting for everyone (especially me). I think the hyperventilating is my nervous system trying to kickstart my adrenal system, which usually regulates your blood pressure so you don't fall down when you try to stand up. People always tell me to stop breathing like that, but it's not voluntary. Anyway, this year my blood pressure just started going up. And up. And up. Sometimes it was recorded around 210/180. Most of the time it was 150-160/90-100. Neither of these are good but ones a lot better than the other.

Blood pressure medication didn't help much, it just kept it from going over 170/110, which is still pretty bad. I was on the max dose and it still wasn't working. At that point they stop telling you you need to exercise and eat right, and they start telling you to stop exercising and eat as much salt as you want because that's not the problem. And then they send you to an endocrinologist to figure out why your hormones are all messed up. Most people don't get the answer that I got - pheochromocytoma - and most people can control their blood pressure with lifestyle modifications or a different medication.

I've never had a CT scan of my abdomen before despite my many health challenges since childhood. I was a little nervous - what if they found something else was wrong, or I had a bunch of problems, or cancer - but I didn't expect what they DID find.

A kidney stone 6 or 7 mm in size was completely obstructing my left kidney, and I had stage 4 (last stage) severe hydronephrosis. None of my blood work indicated a kidney problem, but suddenly everything made sense to my genius endocrinologist. My other hormones were all low, my renin pretty high, and my fractionated metanephrines two times off the charts because my kidney and the attached adrenal gland were too distressed to do their jobs. Their jobs include producing hormone that regulates blood pressure and androgens for hormone production. My whole body was a mess because one kidney was in peril.

But you know what's really weird? The kidney didn't show any damage and the right kidney seemed to have totally picked up the slack. I never had any serious pain that would catch my attention from the kidney stone, so I never guessed I'd ever had one.

It's taken years to get to this point. I started having real problems with my blood pressure 3 years ago, and problems with adrenaline surges 4 or 5 years ago. No one knows for sure how long I lived with my kidney like that, but one thing has stuck out: My left leg used to swell up terribly when I sat for any length of time. I started about ten years ago and I'd tried everything from compression garments to lymphatic treatments. Nothing had made it stop, somethings did improve it.

My left leg hasn't swelled up since the 6th, when I had a procedure to remove the stone.

This was something that caused me a lot of discomfort and cut into how many hours I could spend sitting at my desk and painting. It made standing and painting particularly uncomfortable. I spent a lot of days sweating in compression leggings and a lot of mornings trying to wrestle my body into them. I thought I'd have to live with my jumbo leg forever.

I have a renal ultrasound exam on the 27th to determine if I'm actually through this ordeal, but my fingers are crossed for a clean bill of health. My blood pressure is already better and I'm looking forward to getting off blood pressure medication and resuming hiking and other activities. I'm also looking forward to painting more once my energy stabilizes and stops fluctuating so much from one day to the next. I still do my weird half-faint hyperventilate thing, but I'm hoping getting off the blood pressure medication will eventually eliminate a lot of that. Who knows? Maybe when it's all said and done my POTS will go away.

Life is weird. Bodies are weirder. Let's hope 2025 is a little less on the weird side and a little more on the productive and life-moving-forward side.

See you on the flip side.

Dry Faster: Illuxcon Rundown

 One of the things I didn't quite realize when I moved to Georgia from Montana was how much longer oil paintings would take to dry. Montana is quite arid, even in the winter months when it snows, and Georgia is the polar opposite in almost every way. It's almost always humid here even when it hasn't rained in weeks. I don't know how it manages it.

It's also been awhile since I had to force paintings to dry faster. In fact, I haven't really had to do that since I moved here. I thought I'd have more opportunities here, but the opposite has been true, which in hindsight makes sense. Leaving the region where I grew my business for over a decade, had tons of friends in the industry, and knew how things worked was obviously not going to be great for business.

But with Illuxcon on the horizon and my brain back in mostly working order I finally had a reason to need something to dry faster. I had to think about it for a minute - how did I do this when I lived in Montana? Oh yeah!

Thankfully the week leading up to Illuxcon was a little on the chilly side so it wasn't a huge problem to have a space heater running 24/7 in the studio. My paintings were still a little damp so we had to place them carefully in the car and off we went on what should have been a pretty easy 11 1/2 hour drive to Reading Pennsylvania. I realize that may sound a little ridiculous to most people, but Luke is a trucker so he's used to driving for that many hours a day.

Unfortunately, very unfortunately, we ended up behind multiple fatal multiple-vehicle accidents and spent between 17 and 18 hours on the freeway on Thursday. My hopes of getting there early enough in the evening to say hello to anyone at Illuxcon were dashed and we finally collapsed into the uncomfortable hotel beds at 2 AM.

The next afternoon we arrived a little sleep-deprived to set-up my booth for Illuxcon. Set-up went pretty easily. I feel like you struggle with this part the first few or maybe half-a-dozen to a dozen times, but eventually you know how everything goes together and you learn how to organize things so that it's easier to lay them all out quickly. Set-up only took us 20 or 30 minutes and then I was off to wander around the show and say hello to everyone I could find at that point.

Illuxcon is different from a lot of conventions where the emphasis is on selling things. The showcase is marketed more towards artists and it ends up being more of a networking or social event than a sales event. I still sold some prints and traded decks, met lots of new people and put faces to names, and talked a little bit about business with printing companies, game companies, and my new agent, Tatiana.

In the end I came home with only one original since it was too wet to send with Tatiana. The rest all went with her and will be available soon at https://www.tdartgallery.com/ArtistGalleryRoom.asp?ArtistId=1534. If there's something you saw at the show and you want to snag it before someone else does, send Tatiana an e-mail at TDArtSales@gmail.com and she'll get you squared away.

I ended up missing the Main Show entirely at Illuxcon since I spent most of my daytime hours trying to get my 13-year-old caught up on his gifted homework and keep him entertained. We did manage to go see the M.C. Escher exhibit at the Reading Public Museum, which is normally $10 per person but worked out to about $6 per person for us with Luke's veteran discount. At $18 for 3 people we'd be stupid to miss it.

Here's my son, wearing my almost destroyed hoodie from the college I took figure drawing classes at, giving us his best post-Escher face.

The exhibit was massive and contained more Escher work than I'd ever seen before, including unauthorized blacklight Escher posters. They were as trippy as you'd expect. Mostly I took videos as I zoomed along after Wolf, who paused at only the most geometric designs.

The museum also has an expansive Founder's Gallery full of oil paintings of all different ages, some ancient art, Native American art, armor, weapons, and furniture, and a Geometric art exhibit, in addition to other things that I didn't get to spend much time looking at. I did get to spend a few quiet moments with Nefrina, the museum's resident mummy.

Nefrina has been at the Reading Public Museum for a long time and they also have this reconstruction of her face as well as a hologram-style video that plays every 8 minutes, wherein Nefrina gives a summary of what we know about her. I actually thought this was a really touching and reverent exhibit, whereas most mummy exhibits seem a little less so to me. I left Nefrina with a head full of new painting ideas and rejoined my family at the traveling Dinosaur Train exhibit.

Here's Wolf realizing that he used to watch the Dinosaur Train TV show. "How could I forget Dinosaur Train?" he asked in wonderment when he finally quit ringing the train bell.

As for Illuxcon the showcase was an interesting experience. I sold a little bit of stuff but the emphasis, as I said before, is more of a networking opportunity. I also think that in general this is a bad year for sales. The economy is fine but wage inequality and greed-flation have a lot of people pinching pennies. Add in the uncertainty of the election and a lot of people are scared to spend any money. Add the two together and things become rather frustrating for anyone selling something people don't absolutely need. I heard some artists complaining loudly about the lack of sales, which I always think is gauche and you should never do in front of customers, but most people were having a good time and the bad apples always sort themselves out or weed themselves out eventually.

The drive home was uneventful, a bit boring and long, but we arrived just in time to go to bed in our own bed. I really needed that after three nights of elbowing my husband on a full-size bed. Why are so many hotels lying and calling their rooms "queen suites" and then furnishing them with full-size beds? Do they really think people won't notice that two adults can barely fit on it? Sheesh.

As for me, I'm giving myself a few days off to do some more cleaning, decluttering, and DIYing just in time for the witches' new year (Halloween/Samhain) before I throw myself at some Yuletide painting. I can't wait to have the studio full of paintings and activity, and maybe even a little Christmas music, once again.

Normal, Well-Developed

 According to my EEG, I have normal well-developed (or something like that) background brain activity, so at least no one can accuse me of being weird or lacking when it comes to background brain activity. I was thinking back to the last time I "spaced out" and threw a paintbrush and it's not happened since the springtime. In June my cardiologist put me on a nerve pain medication to make me sleep properly and to heal my autonomic nervous system and ever since I haven't had any problems with throwing drawing implements.

They say that being tired can worsen or bring about a seizure and I'm guessing that my years and years of sleep deprivation have probably always been to blame for the times of my life where I've had focal (just one arm) or absent (staring off into space) seizures. They may subject me to longer testing to see if they can record any abnormal activity in a longer period of time, but the concern isn't that I have epilepsy or anything that severe. They just think I have brain damage possibly from not sleeping or my immune system - not great either but I'll take it.

I read a lot of my own medical notes these days and think it's always funny how I'm described. I know they are clinical terms but I want a t-shirt that says "7 out of 7 doctors think I'm pleasant and well-developed." No? Just me?

Anyway, I guess the next thing is an MRI, but we're still waiting to hear from Swedish Medical Center in regards to whether the metal implants I received there 25 years ago are MRI-safe or not. They're next to my spine so that's rather important and my neurologist won't order the MRI until we know. I'm sure they are, but they want confirmation. Understandable since MRI machines are very expensive and it's very difficult to repair a human who has had their spine ripped out (unlikely to happen, but sounds very funny [to me, anyway]).

This week I've been getting ready for Illuxcon which happens next weekend. It's been one of those weeks where everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong. Monday, I don't even remember what the calamity was on Monday. Oh, that's right - it was everything possible that morning. Mostly my dogs conspired together to treat me very badly on Monday morning. Tuesday it was one thing after another including one of the dogs figuring out how to get out of the yard and chase after the mail truck. I knew I had to order frames on Tuesday at the very latest for my new paintings I want to show at Illuxcon, so I did that first thing in the morning only to discover there was some kind of glitch with Visa cards. I tried over and over to update my order but my card never worked, so I finally had to use my Mastercard to order the damn things and pray the order got in under the wire for Monday delivery. Thankfully they arrived way early on Saturday, otherwise I may have been sitting in the backseat with my framing tools - or just showing paintings without frames. And who can forget - the French press was accidentally shattered on Monday or Tuesday evening. I was dismayed by the prospect of no coffee until next week since I've only recently been able to drink it again (nervous system damage), but even lack of a coffee pot wouldn't stop me. I grew up in a place where it snowed so much we often didn't have electricity, so I know how to do most kitchen things with not much more than a cast iron skillet, wood fire, a measuring cup, and a mesh strainer. At least I could use the electric kettle, but it was cold enough most of the week that I could have used the wood stove if I had to. Thankfully the new French press arrived earlier than expected as well and my calamitous week turned around really nicely.

I just spent too much time looking through old photos trying to find any pictures of the incredible snowload we would get where I grew up, but it was so commonplace I rarely ever took photos. I mean, how often do you take pictures of the ground where you are? But I did find a bunch of photos from 8-12 years ago of "Christmas" (really more like Jul/Yule, but, yunno) at my grandmother's house which made me really homesick and sad. I was already homesick, just as I am most days. I used to paint so many winter scenes and then something really odd happened between 2014 and 2016 and I ended up in Georgia. I think I wasn't sleeping much then either and thought I needed a change of scenery when what I really needed was sleep medication.

Winter was always my favorite season and I really miss the snow but most of all the feeling of being cozy inside. I miss the smell of hot coffee and woodsmoke in the morning, which you can smell here too but it just hits different when it's -20 outside. I miss waking up under 3 blankets and a pile of cats and dogs, the quiet of a house covered in snow, and how pretty Yule decorations are against a snowy backdrop. It never feels like Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, or even New Year's Eve here. I've really missed holidays that feel like holidays, and if I could find a way home for the holidays, I'd jump at the opportunity.

Alas, I will just have to revisit my winter paintings and start working on a new one (I started it and will be bringing "Little Thief" to Illuxcon). It is past time that I get to work on Christmas/Yule images and I am dying to get started. I have a big, elaborate painting on the easel right now and as soon as it is finished for Illuxcon I'll finish 1 or 2 more watercolor pin-ups and then start a new oil painting - a WINTER oil painting!

On Friday evening I posted the collectors' preview for Illuxcon and two of the pieces sold right away. If I have time I may try to get a few more watercolor pin-ups ready to take with me. If you're interested in any of the pieces in the collectors' preview make sure to e-mail Tatiana at TDArtGallery.com - she's my representative. Otherwise hopefully I'll see you at Illuxcon and expect an entry about Illuxcon in early November at the latest.

Illuxcon Collectors' Preview

 I had hoped to have a more polished-looking preview for you tonight. Alas the oil paintings are either not finished or too wet to put in the scanner, so let's start with the small Halloween watercolors which I did scan.

If you want to reserve any of these paintings before Illuxcon you'll want to e-mail Tatiana @ TDArtSales@gmail.com.

"Last Leaf" (sold)

9x12 watercolors on hot press paper

Colors are more subtle and interesting in person, I feel.

$150

"Halloween Flight"

9x12 watercolors and gel pen on hot press paper

$150

"Autumn Perch" (sold)

9x12 watercolors on hot press paper

$150

"Discovery of Dragons" (fantasy parody of "The Finding of Moses" by Alma-Tadema)

16x20 oils on canvas

$2,000, framed

"Little Thief"

12x16 oils on Arches Oil Paper

I'm trying to squeeze in one more painting before we hit the road.

$750, framed to match "Unfamiliar Familiar" (at end)

I'll also have several works from the last year, some framed and some unframed, on display including

"TBR (To Be Read)"

12"x20"ish oils on primed paper

$1,100 framed

"Blue Moon"

9"x12" oils on canvas panel

As seen in Infected by Art 12

$600

"Snow Moon"

A little larger than 13"x19" oils on primed paper

$1,000

"Mourning Moon"

10"x15" oils on primed paper

$750 framed

I'll also have some originals from the Angel Guidance Tarot and some older originals that haven't been offered for sale before including "Unfamiliar Familiar"

If any of these paintings interest you, you can send purchase inquiries to Tatiana at TDArtSales@gmail.com and if you have other questions about the paintings you can comment here or send those to me at studio@spellboundbrush.com.

See you soon!

2006-2012

 This week feels like it dragged on forever. It's exactly 7am Eastern time as I begin to write this post on Friday morning, so the week is still not over yet. Lately it feels like the weeks fly by but not this one. I suppose staying up late to watch the northern lights was not helpful in making this week feel like it is dragging less, but it was really exciting. Down here near Atlanta we almost never see them, so twice in one year feels especially magical.

We're lucky to live in an area that has very little light polution and it's easy to see the stars on any clear night. The aurora looked quite sinister through my Nikon camera, but was pretty pink, purple, and a splash of blue on my phone.

Recently I read some quotes from artists who felt that one couldn't be an artist and an illustrator, a point of view I've never understood. I've always tried to understand every art medium I could get my hands on and I think that everything I've tried has informed my abilities as an artist. Nature photography was one of my first real art-loves and I still love to get out with my camera and photograph nature's splendor.

When it comes to the aurora photos above it's not simply the shifting nature of the aurora that caused the different colors. I took pictures on both devices simultaneously, so at the same moment my phone captured pink/purple and my camera captured red. The difference is really just the ISO, or film speed. Lower ISOs require more light, or more time, to capture an image, and higher ISOs require less. At night with an ISO of 100, the camera MUST be on a tripod and the shutter is open for more than a minute, but the color is more saturated and the image of finer quality. Higher ISOs will yield more grain and you'll lose the tiny details like all of those little specs of stars.

I have not figured out how to record a video of the auroras yet, but when I move to Montana next year I'll have more opportunities to master that.

For now what I have done is finally finished adding all of my artwork to my Redbubble store!... all of my artwork from 2006-2012, anyway, with a few left out because I didn't like them or they were just too small to meet today's high-resolution printing standards. You can visit my Redbubble Shop if you want to see my old artwork. I'll start working on 2012-2018 next week, and eventually I'll get around to 2018-2024. 

Oops, Disappeared Again

 I'm so sorry I disappeared on you again, little blog. Truthfully it's just been so chaotic lately that I have started several entries and then forgot about them entirely. Let's see, over the last 2-3 weeks we

• Started really decluttering the house, donating clothing, and deep-cleaning in order to prepare for moving
• Priced a bunch of our belongings and held a small yard sale
• Decided we will have an estate sale closer to the winter holidays because there is just so much fabric and Christmas ornaments from my grandmother's house that it makes more sense to set it up indoors in the winter time
• I've also been painting as much as I can manage for Illuxcon which is in like, 2 weeks (aaahhh!)
• I also had about eleventy-billion medical appointments and some tests for which I had to drive to Atlanta

Even though we mostly were spared any hurricane damage here, the roadway damage north of us in North Carolina and the evacuations from Florida have dramatically changed interstate traffic here for the worse. Driving to my appointments took twice as long as it should and getting home wasn't any better. Yesterday I had an EEG and had to spend 2 hours riding in the car on the way home, sleep-deprived (on purpose for the EEG) and with a head covered in glue. I have some other tests and appointments coming up and hopefully one of these things will give us some good and treatable answers about what's happening inside my noggin!

Something else that has definitely eaten into my blogging time lately has been uploading all of my art to Redbubble. Okay, not quite all of it. There are some of my oldest pieces that I think are just so bad I won't bother with them. The rest of it is going up, though. I'm still working on it a little at a time but I had forgotten how much old art I have.

Over the years I've had to phase out what prints I had available through my site because it's just too overwhelming to keep them all in stock. We're talking about hundreds of images. Even if I only kept 2 prints on hand of each image, it could easily be a thousand prints. I just don't have room in my studio, plus I don't want to deal with the website upkeep associated with so many prints.

Since I had phased them out I hadn't even looked at some of these images in such a long, long time that it was finally like seeing them with different eyes. I have an excellent memory for images, not so much for other things, so the usual tricks like holding them up to a mirror or putting them away for a day or two don't really work for me. I still can't objectively see them until I haven't actually seen them for a year or more. Artists often do those things so they can see what needs work and what's good in a painting, but it just doesn't do anything for my brain.

Looking at them now that I haven't looked at some of them in a few years I realize that even though they weren't all executed that well, there were some pretty solid ideas that are worth revisiting in the future. It's also igniting a little spark of inspiration that drove a lot of my older work that I haven't felt for a long time. 

I've spent a whole day poking at this blog entry. In the interim I've given away most of my gardening stuff and hopefully found a new home for my flock of chickens and ducks. We'll see tomorrow if the prospective new owner shows up to collect them or not.

Hopefully I'll get more art done tomorrow!

Happy Autumn

 It's the first day of autumn. I've never really gotten used to the seasons here in Georgia. I hoped that after being here a few years I'd adjust to it, but it still feels wrong. It's forecast to be in the 90s again today, although it will cool off by about 20 degrees later in the week. My brain clearly thinks it is summer, and the part that knows it isn't supposed to be is clearly offended. For years I lived where it wouldn't be unusual to have snow by the first weekend of October and the wrongness of 90 degrees in autumn has just never fully worn off.

The equinox just about marks three months now since I (finally) started taking medication for my "brain problems." We still don't know what caused the brain problems, but my neurology appointment is finally in the next three weeks, along with pulmonology and endocrinology. I think we're finally getting closer to an answer. Three months of actually sleeping does something magical to a human who hasn't properly slept for years.

I used to have this vague recollection that I was a different person. I knew that I must have had more energy, because I worked all day, cooked healthy meals three times a day, worked out, cleaned the house, and took care of a toddler. Over the last few years I was lucky if I managed to cook once and work a few hours a day at most. I couldn't remember things that I liked to eat or even some of the recipes that I'd made at least once a week for years in my 20s. Didn't know the names of bands that I liked, misplaced a lot of my belongings, forgot how to run my business, and in general just sort of fell apart. I knew it must have been different before, or was that just the passing of time adding sweetness to memory, and I was actually always a mess?

Recently I started remembering these things. I started listening to The Pretty Reckless again, cooking the turkey chili I'd made for years, and finding myself able to make business decisions again. I suddenly have so much energy for organizing and cleaning the house and now I have years of decluttering to catch up on compounded by inheriting the bulk of my grandparent's furniture and belongings.

I also remember a lot of other things that have left me a little perturbed. I really liked living in Montana. How did I even come up with the decision to move to Georgia? Okay, there were a lot of practical pros and cons at the time, and I do think that it put me in a position to buy property that appreciated enough for me to buy a nicer property in Montana. So I can't be too mad at myself for that. But I also really loved my friends and being able to go home to Washington for the weekend if I wanted to. How did I put all of that aside?

In hindsight now I think things were spinning out of control in 2015 and that's when it really started. By 2016 my cognitive issues had started to really cascade and I dismissed a lot of it as needing to have my thyroid medication adjusted and needing a change of scenery. I'm not mad that I moved to Georgia, though. I actually think being here meant that I had access to medical care I might not have ever received in Montana. And like I said, we were able to get a larger house, sell it for a profit, buy an even bigger house, and it looks like we might even be able to double our money on this house if the market holds out long enough.

Living in Georgia also gave me a better understanding of where my husband is from, and why he doesn't like it here (LOL), and it also meant that I got to meet some of his extended family. He has a really big family, though, and there are a lot of people I've still never met. I am also glad that I have experienced life in a place where you can garden year-round. It presents a lot more challenges than I realized it would and gives me a better appreciation for a garden season that lasts one season, ends with cooler weather and a canning frenzy, and gives you a whole season off. There are also so many bugs here, and they all want to eat my garden. I gave up on it this year.

That said we are swiftly coming up on my favorite time of year here. Autumn in Georgia is usually long, gloriously colorful, cool but not too cold, and often very misty, foggy, dark, and gloomy. And I love all of that.

If I have any complaints about living in the Pacific Northwest it's that spring and autumn are too short, if you get either at all. So many springs were snowy until they were blazing hot and dry, so many autumns cut short by an Indian summer that turned into winter overnight. I love those foggy leaf-crunchy autumn walks and the bird-chirping flower-blooming spring days the most. I like those transitional periods, the times between the main events, more than the main event.

Life is just one big transitional phase right now, and I can't wait to see what comes next.