Happy Earth, Wind, & Fire Day! *

 

Well, another year another blog post. Welcome to 2026. And if the world wasn’t in its current state of WTF is even happening, I would say it has been a good year so far. At least in terms of my art I am pretty damn happy.

Last fall I was crazy productive and ended the year with a lot of really great prints. At the start of the year we put our house on the market and the printmaking was put on hold. I shifted my focus to cross-stitching and then taught myself filet crochet. This led to a couple more gallery shows and I even received the 2nd place award at Blue Line Arts’s By Hand - An International Craft Nouveau Competition for my cross-stitch pieces!

We took the house off the market at the start of summer and my studios are back in use. I’ve been printmaking again while still exporing fiber arts. I am also taking an oil painting class this semester and that has me really excited to be painting again! Needless to say I am keeping myself happily busy. Lots of ideas and the hardest part is getting organized and staying focused.

I’ve also moved my website back to Squarespace, so the galleries and such as still a bit of a work in progress. I am hoping to get back to sending out the occasional newsletter. I’ve been in 5 shows this year so far, and besides posting on Instagram I have no way to let people know. So if you want the occasional update about my work and where it can be seen, sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of the page. Thanks 😊

First critique in painting class this afternoon - should be fun! I’ll keep you posted.

* I love that Tidal had a Celebrate Earth, Wind, & Fire ‘September’ Day playlist on their explore page this morning. Enjoy!



Madness I Say!

Well, it has been 1 year and 2 days since my last confession. I am finally creating art again and that has led me back to the blog. The path from there to here was not peaceful or intended - it was more off a twisted ankle leads to rolling down a steep and rock-strewn hill and then crash landing in WordPress with multiple contusions and a bad attitude.

I started watching some Skillshare classes again last month, and that has reignited my creative mojo - thank the Maker! It feels so good to be creating again after almost a full year of making no art at all. Covid and all that goes with it has definitely done a number on me. So I've been making illustrations on my computer in Affinity Designer and Photo because fuck you Adobe and your damn subscriptions! and that has been fun.

But then I hit some Affinity snags while making this piece-

Affinity Designer has no Offset Path. Why??! And then yesterday I wanted to create a half tone and all hell broke loose! You can't seem to make a gradient half tone without unwanted artifacts on the edges! The solutions offered in the forums were just crap Band-Aids to the bigger problem. I was already annoyed with having to constantly adapt the simple Photoshop or Illustrator steps to work in the Affinity programs and apparently yesterday broke me.

I went to the Adobe website.

Now I have been mad at Adobe since they started this whole subscription game. Just let me buy your damn program and be done with it until I want to upgrade! I've limped along with my precious Lightroom3 and who knows how old a version of Photoshop that I had on my old computer for years now. And when I couldn't get Photoshop to work on my new machine, I downloaded GIMP and then searched out new alternatives. I wasn't going to get sucked into the Adobe machine!!! Yet here I am today, seething as I hoist the white flag and don the shackles of a Creative Cloud subscription.

::thedeepestofsighs::

So how does all of yesterday's ragey-foot-stomping-temper-tantrum-I-hate-Adobe!-drama bring me to the zombie blog today?? Well, apparently Adobe Portfolio (it claims to make pretty portfolio websites) is included with any CC subscription, and my annual Squarespace fee is due in a couple days. Why pay for additional (and expensive) website hosting on top of the Adobe Bullshit (Bullshit is much easier to type than Creative Cloud Subscription and soothes me so that is how we will refer to it going forward thank you very much). Let's try to save a couple hundred bucks a year right?! Well that sounds good on paper, I don't use Squarespace's store features as I have a Big Cartel account so no problem loosing that, but Portfolio doesn't have blog capabilities. Okay, since I was already down the rabbit hole, I exported all the blog posts from my Squarespace website and imported them into my old WordPress elfini blog. Ta-da! Now all the posts are together again and I can just add a nice link to the blog in the nav menu of a new Adobe Portfolio website and Bob's your uncle and all that jazz. But that of course called for a blog refresh - removing old outdated widgets and installing a nice new theme - and apparently this morning I have a lot to say about all of this! So here we are. I'm bringing blogging back.

And we all know that writing a blog post is my favorite form of procrastination. When I finish here, I have to actual hit that purchase button for the Adobe Bullshit and then build a new website so I can let the Squarespace subscription go before it renews in 3 days. I just wanted to create a damn halftone. My brain sucks.

Updates and then some...

wow. I logged into my website 2 days ago and realized that not only had I missed posting about the last 2 shows I was in, but I also hadn't added any of the new work I had done this year!

The past eight months have been hard and I have been grieving and depressed for much of it. So much so that my daughter titled one of my recent paintings "The Great Depression of 2017". damn. But like always, I paint what I feel. There has been a lot of positive things among the sad and in the big picture view life is still very very good. I have just allowed myself to be present and feel everything as I moved slowly through all the emotional ups and downs.  And although I feel like I have been creatively off my game, I actually have been painting quite a lot this past month. So, yesterday I photographed the new pieces and updated the galleries. 

I am always struggling with how to organize the galleries on this site. Currently the pages are by medium, but should I include work that is over 2 years old? I've already pulled all photographs off the site. I haven't worked in Cold Wax in awhile, should I pull that too? Should I create galleries based on specific bodies of work? There are definitely 2 different styles of paintings all intermingled in that gallery, but that is just the order I painted them in last year. Now what I'm painting has shifted again into a new body of work, should there be a some sort of delineation in the gallery? 

And I just removed the link to my old dusty blog, and now I'm rambling here! Stange days indeed. So, what have we missed? Buzz - the Art of Encaustic Painting is still up for 3 days at Blue Wing Gallery in Woodland CA. 

The Crocker's Big Names Small Art was last week. I donated this pretty encaustic photograph, but did not attend this year's auction as it was the same night as my daughter's Open House at school. 

I always enjoy BNSA and was pretty bummed to miss it, but there is always next year! 

In upcoming news, I will have my painting "Catrina" in the It Figures show at Blue Line Arts in Roseville. I'm also thinking about putting these small encaustic collages in the Small Works Gallery. 

It is also time to think about what to submit to the State Fair! And the Member shows at Blue Line and Viewpoint are coming up...  #thestruggleisreal

 

So, if you have any suggestions about gallery set ups, I would love to hear them! And I'll try not to fall behind on my website maintanence again, but no promises. :)