Painting Blobs

Hello friends! It’s been a hot minute since I last blogged or emailed and I hope you are enjoying your summer.

It’s been 3 years now since I’ve moved back to Nebraska. So much has happened in my personal life in that time and honestly, it’s been rough. I learned I am Autistic with anxiety and depression (those last two I knew) and it explains how I think differently than most people and my social anxiety. My husband has retired and now volunteers in theater – which is way different than our life during his military career. My kid lives in Japan and has been going through personal things; and then my mom got sick, lived with me, then passed away. My mom dying has been the hardest thing in my life and it has changed me.

Through all of this I have been introspective, trying to figure out who this “ME” is. I’ve been unmasking, trying to remove the people-pleasing aspect of my nature, and what I’m finding is a person I remember from my teens and early 20’s. Someone who had a love of reading, spirituality, traveling, and yes, writing and painting/drawing. During these last few years, I’ve stopped doing the things I think people expect of me (myself included) and have been trying to dial down into what I want to do, what MY art style is, and if I want to retire alongside my husband.

Life has led me down a merry road before Nebraska. I worked as a corporate travel agent when I met my husband and traveled and moved around with him for 25 years. One thing I learned about myself through it all is that I hate flying. My current dream is to get a camper van and take little weekend trips to kooky off-the-highway places, which is something I used to do with my mom. We called them “adventure days.” Some days we jumped in the car to chase an actor who was filming nearby, or drove through McDonald’s several times a day to play their Monopoly game, or visited the Littlest Brown Church and the Biggest Ball of Twine. Sometimes it was casino days in the frigid below-0 temperatures or drives over to state parks and festivals or to see a mini-village and fall foliage, or chasing birds on a beach on a windy day.

I really miss my adventure buddy, but I’m learning it’s time to do it anyway, even though she is gone. So even though I cannot currently afford a camper van, my savings fund has started and I’m going to take some adventures this fall in my husband’s SUV. I’m going to go sleep under the trees, find some rocks for my collection, and get inspired by my surroundings for my own art which has developed into Abstract Expressionism. I find bliss in being purely led by a limited color palette that I choose based on my emotions. Creating art has helped me to process my emotions since “settling down” in Nebraska and honestly, painting blobs has been the most cathartic bit of it all.

I’ll try to keep you updated here on the blog, and here are a few pics of my blob paintings. I hope you enjoy!