Personal Story: Mixed Media Art

As someone who does art for a living, I am a firm believer that in order to stay fresh you must do art that has nothing to do with what you are paid to do.  While I try to get behind the camera for fun, these days my art-away-from-work is typically in the form of therapeutic mixed media.  I have been saving random bits and pieces to glue and paint to something else since I was in elementary school.  I love expressing myself in this way...

This most recent piece of mine is called "She rose...".  When we first got married I found this amazing painting of a woman on a piece of glass at a thrift store.  It was not framed, it was not attached to anything... just sitting in a corner by itself.  I had it in our little apartment for a year, just trying to figure out what in the world to do with it.  One day this beautiful glass painting broke.  And I cried.  And then I gathered up all the pieces I could and packed them away.

Four years later I finally felt the itch to revisit these pieces.  I started out with a cheap canvas from Michael's craft store.  I layered torn pages out of an old old book I found for free and then painted them with watered down blue paint.  With the help of spray adhesive, I fixed the glass shards to the canvas.

I had been toying around with a quote to add...  As I was cleaning up the torn pages, my eyes spotted this quote on the page:

"She rose in the dramatic moment"

There has been so much that I have gone through in the past two and a half years.  Some how I have managed (of course with the GREAT help of David) to still start up and grow this business during that time.  David and I still have a strong and deep relationship and friendship together.  Some days I do not know how I have juggled everything-- all the tough emotions, all the beautiful emotions, the hard work, the long hours,  the new responsibilities.  Several of my friends are going through some big, traumatic and dramatic stuff right now.  We cannot control these things that we are having to go through, but we can control how we rise up in these moments.