i've started up again

We remodeled a room last year.  We replaced the carpet with wood laminate floors and hung several mirrors, side by side, for dancing.  It is a large room that leads to our pool, where I have my desk, and we have the only TV in the house, some rockers, a comfy couch. I imagined this would be a place for the kids to sing and dance and act.  They do a little bit filming there.  But the room isn't really being used for its intended purpose.  The kids do their dancing and singing upstairs where the piano and drums and microphones are.  Although I do love the new floors I have felt a little bad about not using the room for its original purpose. 

But a couple of weeks ago I realized that the room was an art room.  Just a different kind.  It's MY art room.

Duh.

Over the years I have dreamed of an art room with cement floors and a sink, and convinced myself that it's the only way to truly make the type of messes I tend to make when making art. And I have been so immersed in parenting that I have forgotten how important it is to live life as the artist that I am.  I have spent only a few days in the last ten years doing something I used to love so much, painting.   I have justified that writing, photography, and blogging is enough for me.

Duh.

And so I began setting my studio up a couple of weeks ago, since we have been home.  Without cement floors, or a sink.  Sharing the space with many other family activities.  And two days ago, I made my first piece of art with various papers, oil pastels, pieces of magazine, scissors, and a glue stick.  After an hour of fun and layering and working with colors I came up with the image pictured above.   The next day I made another drawing, an anthropomorphic cut out figure with oil pastels, on a used brown paper bag.

I remember in art school when people would make mixed media images like this and the professors would call them drawings and I would think that was so cool.  Because I had always thought of drawings as lined images made with pencil or pen on paper.

But actually, drawings can be much more.

I feel like I have a little bit of art school still with me.  I feel like a college kid again, only a bit wiser.  This rebirth makes me so happy I am bursting at the seams.  I can hardly wait to make more.