3 Cats, 11 x 14 acrylic on canvass, by Tammy Vitale

Expanding the subject matter a bit.  Sometimes it takes me a while for painting – I tend to get focused on one thing and then can’t think of anything else. 

Went to Michael’s and priced canvass.  I got these from Cheap Joe’s catalog.  I was aghast at the cost of canvass these days (pre stretched).  I have a 36 x 48 picture I did back in the 90s – it was the biggest pre stretched canvass I could find at the time – just to see if I could do a piece that big.  It’s hanging in the living room and I’d post a picture of it if my batteries hadn’t died this morning.  But I looked at a smaller canvass yesterday (it wasn’t 24 x 36, but there was a 36 in the number) and it was $56!  And Michael’s is supposed to be cheap!

I forget that each of these canvasses I am so blythly painting away on, play painting, is about $5.00 each.  Maybe I should switch back to paper (but then you have to frame the doggone things if you want to present them anywhere)(maybe I should have stuck with my original 5 x 7 sizes – but I’m nothing if not in love with "big" is better when it comes to art).

I just pre-posted for the rest of the weekend since I am out of here early tomorrow to go to shepherdstown for an environmental conference (and art safari).  So this will be necessarily short.  Today is clean the studio day and I’m going to get that done, or at least a good part of it done.  I really have to pay more attention to staying on top of the clay dust (especially in the winter when the furnace, if we use it, pulls air from the basement).  And I’m in the mood for that so I might as well take advantage of it.  I haven’t even thought about packing yet, and our dryer gave up its ghost so, with bad weather coming and hanging out doors not an option today, I’m hoping I have enough clean clothes (that’s Husband’s baliwick – and he’s usually pretty good about staying on top of the laundry, but I haven’t paid any attention to what jeans I have clean because mostly I don’t need clean jeans, I need my old holey ones, when in the studio).

Oh, and I did get myself into the studio yesterday. Made  5 fish but my heart wasn’t in it, so I stopped.  then made a bunch of Christmas ornaments – angels, gingerbread men, teapots (I had the cutout, so why not) for the upcoming shows.  It made me feel productive whether or not they sell, and it used up a lot of tids and tads of clay.  Then I could come upstairs and play with my paints and not feel guilty.

thought for the day:  The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.  Joseph Campbell

Here’s the amazing truth:  You don’t Attract what you want, or even what you deserve.  You Attract what you expect.  Think of expectation as similar to mood; it’s the lens through which you’re looking.  Your mood colors your predictions about the future, and that is the precise sort of future you being to expect.  You come into relationsihp with that future long before it appears.  Victoria Castle, The Trance of Scarcity:  Hey! Stop Holding Your Breath and Start Living you Life