Searching for Myself

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After a morning of conversations with people I needed to call, or who called me, I headed out to the garden for some pruning, chopping, and mulching. I have decided it is all too much for me and I need to get someone in here to weed, mulch, and do yard work. I love the exercise and working in my little piece of land that I try and make paradise, but it is hard on my body all this ripping and hauling of heavy mulch and soil bags and tossing it about. I need to bite the bullet and hire someone.

I did take the later part of the day to work in the studio for four hours. I needed some time to get intimate with my work space again. After what seemed a long hiatus, I swept, framed, gessoed a group of panels, and finished up a few pieces.

Lately I find myself exploring my past and coming to terms with it through my art. I don't know that anyone will "get" what I am doing, but that is not important to me right now. I have sold some of these autobiographical mixed media pieces oddly enough. It seems strange to me that anyone might be interested in my sometimes sordid life, or in this blog where I leak out bits and pieces of my soul. But there are a handful who do and for that I am grateful.

Tonight's piece is a mixed media piece, a scrap of an antique paper girl whom I have looked at for a long time in my studio. She is pasted onto a little painting done looking out onto the Hudson from one of the estates.

I grew up on waterways and in the mountains of the Catskills. A very black time where my only sense of beauty and hope was in the beauty of the landscape and the forest. If was there that I found refuge, and hiked, wrote poetry, painted, and harvested the flowers and wild fruits that it bore.

My other blog, Catskillpaper also features some of the other work that I don't show here. Too many stories for one place!!

Patti

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