Something interesting happened on my way to a resignation...

...life called me by my first name.

For quite some time I have been intending to post to this blog and let you all know that I would be taking a break from painting and from The Capricious Painter...I just couldn't find the right words to say...

January proved to be a stressful month for me. For reasons I can't explain I reentered a serious grieving period over my son. It hadn't been that bad for a while but suddenly its like he died yesterday.

My direct supervisor resigned effective just before Christmas break. To his credit he has moved on to be part of a group that is establishing a brand new company serving the disabled. He will be very good at that but I can't help but wonder if he really knew how good he was at this job and how much we all needed him. Still, he shouldn't let any thing hold him back least of all sentiment. My company has split his job and hired two wonderful people but still, they aren't him now are they? Then two weeks later my counter part resigned his position for a great career change. I'm very happy for both of them but I miss them both. Besides, you know what a drag it is to train a new supervisor...ha ha!

My health has also been an issue. I have struggled with unusually strong palpitations which, believe it or not, leave me exhausted. Saturday night we went to a friends for a gathering. As I was walking across the street with a casserole dish in my hand I was suddenly over whelmed with fatigue and had to hand the dish to my Dana just so I could make it back to the car. Weird huh? So now I'm sentenced to wear a thirty day event monitor so they can try to figure out whats going on.

Speaking of Dana, he has been ill also with a very serious upper respiratory infection. Things at my house have been a continuous cycle of dragging ourselves to work and then back to the house where we both sleep the hours away trying to wake up feeling somewhat normal again.

In the mix of all of this I had been working on a painting. I was struggling with it and was losing the joy of it. I really attribute this to my fatigue. It just felt wrong to me...it began to look horrible to me. I was very unhappy and had decided that my ability to paint was so poor, so without any merit that I should just give it up once and for all. I was unhappy with my inability to break out of my routine use of color, my routine brush strokes, my routine everything. I can't see any growth and don't feel like I have the time or money to devote to improving my skill level. Out of sheer frustration I was just finally done!

.......So I said to my sister LaVonne on the phone the other night in regards to an issue she was dealing with that "if you don't listen to life when it speaks to you it's forced to raise it's voice"......

I had not been upstairs in my studio for weeks, too depressed to go back. Sunday night, no it was actually Monday morning, at 4:11am I heard the biggest crash upstairs. Like things being knocked over and falling to the floor. We had a guest sleeping upstairs in the other room and I was concerned that he had knocked a lamp off of the night stand. I lay there for a while but there was no other sound. The next day neither he or Dana reported hearing the crash. So last night when I got home from work I climbed the stairs up to my studio and opened the door to see if the sound had come from there. It had. Something big fell of the wall where it has hung for a very long time and when it fell it took two other things with it, although nothing was broken. I picked everything up to make sure all was okay and when I turned around there was my unfinished painting on the easel looking back at me. It was a sudden confrontation, I hadn't consciously thought about it before I saw it. My very first thought was "Damn, that's not a bad painting and the sky is beautiful."

I kind of scooted around the room and backed out still watching the painting as though it was going to jump off the easel and follow me down the stairs.

Its not going to win any national juried shows, its not going to be a gallery door buster, but its not a bad painting...and I like it. I like it.