Right on time...

Orange oxide lineup

Hello and thanks for joining me!

Happy New Year! What? Well, it was my birthday yesterday so I am proclaiming it a new year, so if things haven't been going your way so far in 2014, have a do over on me. This winter has been a harsh one and I know many people are ready for spring with it's new beginnings, flowers, unicorns and sunshine.

Unicorns!? Hey, it's my blog and I can say what I want. Anyway, today is the last day of my exhibition, The Ghosts of the Past Exposed at the Anne Kittrell Gallery at the University of Arkansas. I am so glad I was able to complete my project and show the work in such a fine setting as the Anne Kittrell. Who knows what is next for that body of work but I think some good things are brewing.

Today, I am writing my blog from my studio... which studio you ask? That would be my attic studio. I have had a bit of a mental block when it has come to really utilizing this space after the old underground closed and I lost my studio at the end of December 2011. I have made work up here but not as regularly as I would like. Of course since the start of 2012 I have been away from Arkansas for a year combined, with my two trips to Scotland and the 2 months I spent in Atlanta. When I write it down like that, it is no wonder that my studio space here feels a bit discombobulated.

I have worked on Stewart's kitchen worktop, dining table and in his living room studio. Then of course I had my own lovely studio in Edinburgh for 4 months as well. I have also worked on my own random tables throughout my house. I can work anywhere but there are preferred spaces. Spaces that have one purpose, one focus and are imbued with that certain energy. A storehouse of innate wisdom that wraps you up like a warm blanket just at the moment when you feel you have forgotten everything, that is what a studio is to me.

This attic space used to be that and I want it to be that again. Currently, I am flooding the space with my music, I am writing up here again and I am touching all my paints and materials. As I do this, I am remembering all the art I created in this private space since 2003. There is no gallery down the hall and there is no fanfare once a month but there is freedom in the paint splattered window panes and possibility in the creaky hardwood floor. There is still the muscle memory in my legs that carried me up here many years in the dark of 3 am to escape into my art. There is the light in the east and west and there is the memory of hundreds of paintings that were happily created here and that now live far away and in many homes.

This is my new year and my studio is a new opportunity once again. I hope you will come along and see what happens next.

"It's up to me now, turn on the bright lights..."