Creative Block

I have my studio set up again and I have everything ready to go but I am finding it hard to get the creative juices flowing.

Our life has been very stressful since leaving Atlanta. The woman to whom we let our lovely home when we left, and who we thought was a very nice person, promptly stopped paying the rent and would not answer emails or phone calls. It turns out that despite the reference checks we did that she is a real con person, liar and thief who has been ripping people off for years. She has been served a dispossessary 16 times in the last eight years for not paying rent but has evaded paying any money back by knowing how to play the system. She told us one lie after another and now owes us thousands of dollars and yet she is still in the house and will not leave. We are in the process of evicting her and have a court case coming up in a few weeks time. She has a good job and can afford to pay but just takes advantage of people instead. She has a daughter of 17 and when I told my kids the story they were horrified at what a bad mother she is and what a dreadful example she is setting for her daughter. As they said, no matter how smart she thinks she is, in her quiet moments the knowledge of what she has become will always be there. It's very sad.

So all of this has made it hard to focus on being creative. I am hoping that it will all be over in a week or so and that I can get on with my life and art making. I did buy a fun winter hat today and found a $10 note on the way home so I took that as a good omen!

Paint, Paint and More Paint!

I have been painting solidly for three days but not the sort of painting that I like doing. The house we have moved into has a laundry in the basement and it was very messy. I have spent the past three days cleaning and scrubbing everything, scraping off old paint on the concrete painted floor and then giving the floor three coats of paint. It's difficult when you have to work around a washer and dryer and a huge shelving unit. For the walls, I started off using some paint that was left here in the house. I was trying to be ecologically green and not throw left over paint into the garbage but I got more than I expected! It was a green that I thought would look fresh however once I got it up it on a couple of walls I decided it was an awful shade and would make me really mad every time I went down there. That's the thing with acrylic paint. It always dries darker than it looks when wet and being an artist I should have remembered that. There was only one solution, add in lots of while and redo the two walls I had already done. It looks a lot better now but still a bit greener that I would have liked. By tomorrow it should be finished and I can get into my studio and do some real painting