New Year, New Directions

 A New Year always seems to be full of new beginnings and hopes to change habits and directions. 2020 seemed to be a bad year for the world with this Sars-CoV 2 virus emerging from whatever source it came from. Being in rural Queensland, we haven't been greatly affected with lockdowns, limits on our personal freedoms. My work place has had major changes due to the pandemic with an increase in swab testing, new test procedures on our Genexpert for stat testing to determine whether full Covid isolation occurs for new inpatients and all of this without an increase in staff.

Farm wise, we have proceeded along with better prices for beef cattle due to the easing of the drought with some relief rain but still insufficient to fill all of the water storages in our area and Covid procedures have not greatly affected the farm.

I mentioned I was doing the  Finding Meaning/ Voice course  with Lisa Call from October to January 2021.This coincided with my first solo exhibition in Wondai Regional Art Gallery and I had organised time off from work to prepare for this. It also ended up being quite a stressful time family wise as 2 of our ageing parents had some major health issues in November. I sold 4 pieces at the Gallery during the 4 weeks so that was some good news. I managed to keep up with my assignments for the course and developed a deeper understanding of my art and maybe some new directions to follow. 

The New Year started with the passing of my Father In Law who had just turned 91 at the end of 2020. 

These are photos of 3 of my sold pieces. 

Desert Lace.

Purple Night.

Joyful

During September, along with my daughter I attended an alcohol inks workshop. She has gone onto to create quite a few more. With very limited art tutoring, this is one of my favourite pieces to date. I am thinking in time, maybe a joint exhibition if she continues using them.

The Finding Meaning/Voice course has come to a close, and I signed up for Lisa Call's 6 month Incubator and MasterMind Program. This is a self paced project with accountability check ins,coaching calls and online group support from the other 5 participants. I am really looking forward to working out my project. This mainly involves organising my body of work, finding other places to exhibit my work and making new work. I need to set realistic monthly goals and attempt to stick to them as much as I can. As part of the Finding Meaning course I needed to remake an existing piece with new meaning from the areas we studied which add meaning to your art. The original " Detritus" made as part of the Remnants theme.

This is the remake, still a work in progress, as my stitching time has been limited lately. I was trying to add more of my context into this piece, coming from within, I spend a lot of time peering down a microscope, hence the circular overlays. I am thinking there could be more of this in the future, along with a few more landscapes.

The final assignment was to make a Heart demonstrating your Voice. The Voice I want to try to follow is making art recognizable as your style. This is my  heart using Derwent Intense Blocks on paper. I find these more appealing in a sketchbook than coloured pencils.

The course involves writing, speaking about your art and this is where blogging about it comes in. One of my goals is to increase my blogging and instagram posts so I am thinking more short posts about a specific piece. Well, I can only try. Hope to keep it happening a bit more frequent than I have been. Time will show as always.