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!