Live

Lately, remaining present and fully engaged in my life has become more work, requiring more from me each day that we got closer to our move. Much of my mental focus has turned inward, yet I am deeply aware of the myriad of details that make up our life here, and I'm appreciating each one. Each week I feel a shift, now it is 6 weeks to go, next it will be 5, and with each week that passes there is a lightness and also a shift in my inner intensity. As if a switch is being turned to crank everything up inside, my mind runs, if I don't remain focused then I even have trouble sleeping, thinking about everything that must be done!
I'm focusing on self care more, I know that I have to right now, I've been exercising almost daily on this (I really think that everyone needs one, it is sooo fun!!), it really blows off the stress. I am also trying to eat as many veggies as I can, and I'm about to buy a juicer, I'd love any mentions of your favorite kinds of juicers in the comments! Its a big decision!
My daily prayers are like a mantra now, that the highest truth and compassion would work through me, often now what I need is compassion for myself more than anything, patience and a realistic idea of what I can get done in one day!
Frank and I are getting ready for our goodbye party/art show extravaganza on May 7th, and we are trying to fit in dinners with old friends at every chance that we get.
Courage is my operative word these days, I'm sure that is where my latest painting is coming from. Courage and faith propel me forward, we are walking the right path, I know that our move will be wonderful for us, but in this in-between-time, this getting-ready-and-preparing-time, it feels like I could loose my way at any moment if I don't hold fast to our vision.
Long held ideas of myself are being tested and opened up...
"Endings are so hard for me."
"Saying goodbye is so hard for me."
These are two inner dialogues that I have had for much of my life, and they have shaped how I am as a person, but now I feel suddenly able to take a step back, to question. Does it really have to be this way?
Can it be sad but also joyful?
Can I deeply feel and grieve the ending, while also fully experiencing my joy at the life that we are about to begin?
Living in that duality is what I am trying to do, I have to imagine that it can be done and that nothing is ever wasted.

I might be popping in here more with photos than with too many words over these next weeks, I am letting myself post as I feel led. I long to share more of myself here, but at the same time I feel that simply posting photos or a painting without too many words, sometimes is the best way to share for me right now in the midst of living!

Studio clean out

I know it might not look like much but above is where we started, and here is where we ended the other day as our studio clean out continues....

Can you see our progress? It is slow and steady, as with most of the work we stop to photograph it, or reminisce about what was happening when we made each piece. It is hard to decide to throw pieces away, but I know in my heart when I am ready to let go of something, and I feel light as a feather when I surrender to that.

With Frank's help I was able to let go of some of the work that I created before I applied to Grad School 11 years ago,

I saved my favorites from each bunch along with the stretcher bars, so that I can go on to reuse them when I am able to work large again, I loved working so large! I was also able to go through and review more recent work, figuring out what I want to add to my shop. There are some great pieces including the large butterfly one here,

With a lot of my older work I found that there are passages within the paintings that still speak to me, colors and patterns with a lyrical flow like poems,

You can see that back then I was using actual pressed petals within the paintings and including sewn elements like beads and stencils and stitches in the canvas.

In an old box during the clean out we discovered a treasure, Frank's grandfather was an artist and we found his old sets of pastels,

A riot of color that I know the kids will appreciate in a few years, we carefully packed those away.

All of this sorting is getting us ready for a big art show/sale/goodbye fiesta that we are planning as a last blow out here in NYC before we move. We are planning the party for the night of May 7th, I'll be posting full details once we have made all of the plans. It will be at our studio space, with drinks and small bites, so if you are in New York we'd love for you to join us!

Whirlwind

Hello from Charleston,

We have been down here a week tomorrow, and this has been by far been one of the craziest weeks of our lives! Our house in Brooklyn was shown starting last Sunday, the day we left town, and by the end of that day we already had offers on our house. Then, starting last Monday we began looking at houses here in Charleston, and on Tuesday we met our dream house. We walked into it and absolutely fell in love, it is possibly even better than anything that we could have planned ourselves. Among many details that we love it even has bamboo and palm trees in the yard, two things that I have always dreamed of having! All of the above views are within a 5 minute drive of the house.

On Wednesday our offer was accepted on the house here, AND on the same day we accepted an offer on our house in Brooklyn, from a family who really loves the house there! Right now the contracts for both houses are being drawn up and ratified, inspections are being done on the houses and all of the wheels are in motion towards this huge move that we are making. Frank and I both feel so blessed and amazed at it all, the ease with which this is happening feels like such a sign and confirmation that we are headed in the right direction and with the right timing.

We are just amazed, and walking in faith with each step.

Heading towards a life that we really had only dreamed of!

Once we get back to Brooklyn next Friday I'm sure that I'll be able to reflect and share much more about our time here, and maybe more about our dream house!

For now, we are putting one foot in front of the other.

xo

P.S. My friend Arron, a choreographer, recently composed a dance piece based on my painting Awakening, about dreams coming true. You can read her thoughts about the piece and see a video of the performance here on her blog.

Thaw

Yesterday we had the pleasure of being outside without our heavy coats (or even any coat at all!) with the temperature reaching a very spring like and unseasonable 65 degrees Fahrenheit! The park was so crowded and everyone seemed to have a smile on their face, we enjoyed the playground for what felt like the first time in months,

Watching the huge piles of snow, that have slowly turned into dirty gray heaps, melt away to almost nothing was pure joy!

I have been hit hard with the flu this week, spending a few days in bed with a fever and generally feeling awful, so yesterday felt extra special to me as it was my first outing. I think I over did it a bit as we stayed out too long to enjoy the day, and today I don't feel myself again. But we had such fun.

With something like the flu I am re-learning the lessons of taking extra care of my body, because I really need it to work for me! Something as simple as being able to breathe through my nose, or having the energy to sit up for more than a few minutes, has taken on a whole new importance.
Between naps and many cups of tea I am regaining my strength, which I need desperately as we are heading off tomorrow for 10 days in Charleston, where we will look at houses, schools and generally begin to set up our life there. We are excited, Frank is very excited and I am vibing off of his excitement....but I also feel trepidatious, I'm just feeling a little scared by the enormity of the fact that we are selling our house and planning to move to a place that I have only been to once! I feel like this is one of the boldest decisions that we have ever made, and I am walking in trust right now, in that decision based on all of our intuition and reasons from last summer.
I know that right when we arrive tomorrow, I will again know how I feel about Charleston, and I am so excited to GET excited about making our move.
While we are there I will be poping in to share thoughts and pictures from our visit, I'll give you peaks into the neighborhood that we think we want to live in, and scenes from our journeys around the area. Maybe I'll even have some big news to share about finding a house that we love, my fingers are crossed about that!
This week we also had another big occasion, the finishing of our house here in Brooklyn, yes, our renovation is finally completed down to the tiniest detail. It will be shown while we are away, and right now it really looks as good as we could possibly make it look, both Frank and I are extremely proud of a job well done. In honor of finishing off our Brooklyn house renovation project I will post the final installments of the Before and After Renovation Tale of our home. I know that you will be blown away by some of the before and after pictures that I have to share!
xo

Shifting

So, for the past two weeks Frank and I have been working on our house almost daily. There are so many little details to take care of before we put it on the market next month. Much of the work has looked a lot like this,

Frank has been hard at work on the details, but, as he calls it in the decorative painting industry we have finally come to the "visual" part, where many of the details have been completed and now we can see our progress.
I feel so fortunate that our real estate agents are old friends of ours, a couple that I feel super comfortable with and love their sense of decor in their own home. In preparation for selling our home, they did a walk through with us and talked about how we should setup or "stage" our home to show it at its best. Little things like painting, plastering, decluttering, shifting furniture.
The process of staging the house for a sale is really about the psychology of the sale, which was fascinating to talk about with our realtor friends. As they walked through our home they helped us to see little details that we should change, things that we should move around to shift the energy and usefulness of the space, they also saw things that we had thought we should change but they actually liked (like the old painted wooden staircase going downstairs that bends a bit and we thought we'd carpet over, but they loved the original quirky detail).
The first room the we've really set up in it's staged state is our living room which, along with our kitchen, is the heart of our home. I snapped this picture the other day so you can see what things generally look like around here daily after some serious playing,

Now here is the after, the "staged" version,

One of their focuses with staging our house is that they want it to show that you can have kids and still live in a civilized way (heh heh), so most of the toys were moved downstairs to our new playroom, that I'll show you in the next post!

They had us move our couch and television cabinet over by the windows, to create a cozy section there, notice the fluffy white rug that I am now obsessed with. They also had us get a beautiful modern white desk that we placed between our bookshelves, to create a useful spot for doing homework or working on the computer. I love the new desk and I think that it will end up in my new studio after our move.

On the wall opposite the desk and book shelves they had us move our Ikea storage shelf, which is one of handiest things for toy storage. I just bought some simple neutral canvas bins to go with the straw ones that we already had,

Now, after the daily serious playing happens, its easy to just throw all the toys back in the bins and have a clean space again.

This is just the beginning, there's lots more staging to go. The really fun thing about staging the house for me so far has been that I like the way their ideas have freshened up our space, I feel like I am learning things that I'll be able to take with us and use when we go on to live in a new space.

The long story

OK, so here is the long version of how and why, after almost 15 years in New York City we find ourselves getting ready to move to Charleston, South Carolina this year. It is a long story, but I think it will give you insight into my family and what is important to us, plus we've got so many exciting plans for what we will do in Charleston...but I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll start at the beginning.

 

 Here Frank and I are, enjoying ourselves during our first trip to Charleston last June. We love how wide open the sky is there!

Both Frank and I moved to New York City after graduating from college in the late 90's, in fact next August it will be 15 years since I moved here, so it is the place where we have both lived our adult lives up to this point. But, even though New York has been a very thrilling place to live, it was never my intention to live here for the rest of my life, or even for as long as I have! I really moved here on a whim after college, to try and explore the art scene. I had a bunch of friends who were moving here and it seemed like it would be a lot of fun. If someone had told my 22 year old self that I would be raising children in this city I would have laughed at them! But, our lives developed here, Frank and I met here, our art connections were here, and our friends were here, so we stayed, and really our life here in Brooklyn is rich and deep and wonderful. This is the place that I have needed to be, but it is also a hard place to live. Very slowly the little and big annoyances of life in such a huge city began to wear on Frank and I, we started to long for more space and time to pursue our art and raise our family.

In turn both of us came to a place in which inside us there was a shift and we both knew that our time here was drawing to a close. My shift came around the time that Jasper was two and I was pregnant with Carys, then I began to really evaluate the environment that I wanted my children to grow up in. Frank's shift came later and has evolved more closely for him with the cost of his time that he spends supporting our family here, and the time that he spent away from his kids because he was working so much when he was running his own decorative painting company for years. New York City is a very expensive place to live, and at some point we both began evaluating it against the fact that we were stretching our selves financially to live here. "Is it worth it?", was our constant refrain. Finally we made the decision that it was time to look into other places that might better suit our ideal lifestyle more, we love to be outdoors, we love the beach, we also love vibrant city life but with more close access to nature. We visited and seriously considered many places specifically focusing on small cities.... including the east bay area of San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; Miami, Florida.

This was over the past 3 years, and as you can imagine was an exhausting (while exciting) process, and this is where I come to the muddle that we were in at the start of 2010 that I mentioned in my last post. Through searching for our new place, we were really knee deep in hammering out who we are as a family. This whole process led Frank and I on a journey of discovery about who we are way deep down, and what that means about the choices that we are making while raising our children, making our art, and of course what we want in a lifestyle and place to live. One huge thing that come up for us was that we really did not want to live too far from our families, who are all on the east coast of the US (and my brother in England). So, with sadness we decided that anything on the west coast would have to be eliminated. Then we also know that we are not big fans of winter, so we eliminated anything north of New York City, and began focusing our search on the warmer climates of the south. At this same time, in January 2010, Frank's sister and her family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a city that I had loved when I visited on a road trip when I was 23, but had not even thought of since then.

Early last year, shortly after their move, Frank's sister began raving about Charleston to us, everything from the weather to the beaches to the easy lifestyle to the art scene and historic downtown, she made it all sound so beautiful and livable. We were very excited to see it, and I really didn't know what to expect. When we visited them there in June, we were blown away by the city. It is a small coastal city, about 800 miles south of New York and one of the oldest cities in the US, with a very old downtown area that reminds us of Europe with a tropical twist, small winding streets, crumbly buildings dripping with history, spanish moss and palms,

and the life style that we found there was so laid back and easy, the beach is part of the day-to-day, children playing outside everywhere, riding bikes, swimming in lakes. The people are so nice and  friendly.

We also found an exciting and growing art scene in the downtown area of the city, that we could see ourselves being a part of. We were thrilled to find that many old warehouse areas are being renovated into artist spaces, and there is big market for that. Something that Frank and I have always talked and dreamed of doing is to renovate an old warehouse into artists spaces, with a small gallery space, and then rent to other artists, creating an arts community. When we saw that this would be doable there, we began to really get excited.

Another thing that completely sold us on Charleston were the farmers markets, we went to two of the best farmers markets that I have ever been to, anywhere. There is a huge farming community right outside of the city and those farmers bring their goods in twice a week for huge tented markets. There are also artists and crafters selling their art, you can get lunch and wander around. There is even a bouncy castle for the kids that is inflated at the farmers market. The living really felt easy there.

So, we kept looking at each other while we were there, and we could see it in each other's eyes, we just knew that this was the place for us. We did not really talk about it until we were in the car driving away, after our time there. We turned to each other and said let's move here. It all felt so right, clear and peaceful, which was a real sign for me after feeling muddled and confused. So far, with each step, everything is falling into place in just the right ways. We keep talking with people who mention that they know someone there, and everything that we hear about Charleston confirms what we found.

It is also a four hour drive from my family's farm in the mountains in Asheville, North Carolina, which is really special to us, and we'll be able to go there so easily.

Now, the story continues with our actual plans for the move, which right now involves me going through lots of boxes and seriously culling and purging things that we don't use (and don't want to move) getting rid of things has never felt so good! Now I'm off to sort through a few bins of ancient art supplies...

Word of the year and big news...

I love this idea that goes around the blogging world at this time of year about choosing your "word" for the year ahead. I think of it as choosing a word that represents something that you want to manifest in your life and then using that word to help you focus on that quality, there by guiding you towards what is needed.

At the start of 2010 I chose Clarity as my word for the year. I was in great need of definition and clarity in one huge area of my life and at the start of 2010 I felt in a muddle.... and thankfully 2010 brought more Clarity than I had thought possible. At the start of last year I had no idea how true my choice of word would be, and that brings me friends to my big announcement. Frank and I have decided to leave New York City, we are planning to move to Charleston, South Carolina in 2011, ideally this coming June. This decision has been a long time in coming, and at the beginning of 2010 the muddle that we were in was really a place of indecision and lack of clarity about what our next move should be. There it is, my big news! I'll be back soon with the long story behind our decision, and with a lot more on why we chose Charleston. For this post it was enough to just share our news, it has been in the works for a while, but we have just started to broadcast it and to get our house ready to go on the market...which is a whole process in itself (you'll definitely see pictures here of the process!)

So as my word for 2011 I am choosing Strength. Change is hard. I'll need lots of Strength for the tasks at hand, for selling our home, leaving friends and familiar place. And most of all, Strength to hold in sight the fact (and the thrill) that we are following our dreams.

Huge shop update!

Hhhhhhhhhhhhhm. That's me exhaling deeply. Frank was away last week, so being alone with the kids had me running around like a wild woman doing the job of two parents, but we made it through, and I'm so happy to have my sweet man at home again! Somehow this past weekend I completed a huge shop update...and now my shop is full to brimming with pretty things. One of the the things that I'm most excited about are these prints on canvas, that are GORGEOUS!

I put a bunch of them up with my show at Swallow, I love that they look practically just like the originals but at a fraction of the price (spreading the love)! The sides are black all around, and the company that I found to print them just does a wonderful job, I'm so pleased with them.

I had them made in editions of two each of my favorite paintings, you can stop by here to check them out!

OK, another drum roll please....

Also, new to the shop are prints of four brand new paintings, all but one include deer. The piece that I have the biggest crush on currently is this wintry one called...

 Hiding Place 

along with, Close to You,  Faith and Courage, and Traveling Mercies. They are all pieces that I finished the week before my show went up. I usually like to wait and release each piece into the world on its own...but with the whirlwind and thrill of getting my show up I just went for it and added them all to the shop! To top it off I've also added a few more new small originals to the shop. There are this sweet Mama and baby in Little One, that I think is so perfect for a child's room,

and this gentle doe in Tender Footing,

As always, all of my prints are available for custom mounting on a wooden block with a key hole in the back for hanging, this is such a lovely way to see them displayed, it is as if they are just floating on the wall or bookshelf,

I am also totally getting caught up in the holiday spirit, probably something to do with my kid's excitement this year, Jasper is just at the age where he is starting to really get into the excitement of anticipating something. I think that it also has to do with the fact that this year we are planning a Florida Christmas, we are heading to Florida next Monday, away from the cold, to enjoy a warm holiday with Frank's family at his parent's house. Since we have already been having freezing temperatures here in Brooklyn this past week, I am more than ready for some sunshine. Warm thoughts are definitely keeping my spirits buoyant, and with that I would like to share with you that I am  offering a friendly 20% off of everything (even originals) in my shop using coupon code SEEKPEACE until I leave on the 19th, at which time I plan to close the shop for a whole week and simply relax. 

I hear myself deeply exhaling again, ahhh.

P.S. There are only three of my 2011 calendars left, get them while you can...