I want to illustrate another book!!  How do you get someone to hire you.  I am kind of sick of hawking my wares, every audition seems to take a little more out of me.  I just want them to come to me.  Wouldn't that be grand?  How impossible is that?  You do websites, and postcards, and still

who does a girl need to sleep with ?

I am going to do a weird experiment.

I am going to try all week to do something different and out of the ordinary to get attention to my art

I have to start thinking-and I HATE this saying-but OUTSIDE OF THE BOX

oh-I JUST GOT AN IDEA...................

This rolled off my pencil today.    I like it.  It makes me happy.  I actually sent it to the woman in the pic.  I hope she like it.  It was so busy today and yet I feel I got one tenth of what I needed to get done.  Oh, well-there's always tomorrow!!

There are times in my life where I withdraw and sort of recharge.  These are times when a friends request can seem so overwhelming to me, hard tasks to get done-but I do them.  Lately I am wondering if I do things because I am interested and want to-or if I do them to feel needed or to make others feel like I am on their side.  Supportive to mean means all in, although it is sapping me.  I will put by my own desires and projects to work on someone elses.  I make them so much more important and dumb down my stuff.  If I do that enough-which lately I feel I have, I become resentful and tired-really tired.  This also might have to do with my daughter coming home for another drs appt-where they want to put her in a sleep study-when I asked how much he said oh thousands and thousands.  Well, as much as I love my kid, I do not have thousands and thousands.  I also have very very little trust in doctors as for five years she has been going through all this stuff and really, not one person has actually looked at her like a person, or like a whole.  They shove pills at her-so many it is like she is 90, and she still suffers-we have spent and spent and spent until we have nothing left to spend.  It is such a hard place to be, for her, for us,for families like us.    It makes me sad and defeated.  This is probably why I am so tired and overwhelmed today.  Plus, in my gut, just as I don't think she need a sleep study, I think she needs different medications than the ones she is on because everyone of them AFFECTS HER SLEEP CYCLE-this is what the dr said-but sis he suggest different meds or actions -no, he wanted to do a thousands and thousands sleep study.

I know there must be doctors out there who actually listen and care (and yes she answered the same questions time after time-it was like he wasn't really listening)  but i have yet to find one

I think I will go take a nap.

Kids can be hard-cartooning them is pretty easy but trying to capture there little round big eyed faces escapes me.  And they move so fast-lightening expressions.  How do you capture joy in the eyes?  How do you capture joy in the soul.  There are times when you look into a child's face and it is so filled with the joy of the moment your heart almost breaks.  Oh, to be able to have that.  It takes work now to get there,it takes shedding a lot of the crap we pile on ourselves as some sort of truth.  As if suffering and punishment are the norm, as if we don't deserve to enjoy until we have paid a price.  Every once in a whiel you get a glimmer of that purity of the moment, when you are just being-and then as swiftly as you notice it, it is gone.  I must remember to honor those moments more than the painful reality I pretend to live in.  We make it all up as we go-why must it be painful.  I am glas that most times when I see a puddle, I will jump in it.  That I still love to squish mud in my toes, that the smell of fresh mowed grass can knock me right back to childhood and make me want to run outside barefoot and shrieking with joy-Joy_seize it

Oh for spring and color  and warmth!!!!  It was an amazingly insightful weekend for me.  Most of all I found that getting engaged with life, getting our and moving is so very important.  I can so easily fold into myself and forget there is a whole world going on without me.  We saw a 400 year old Vermeer painting-400 years old.  How amazing is that.  Such skill and such patience.  I cannot imagine having to make my own paints, and his light-such glorious light!!!  and 400 years later people are standing in front of it drooling!
I also realized how my tastes have changed over the years-I am smitten by the lines and colors of the 1930s.  I used to find them cold and off putting.  Now I find them so incredibly rich and inspiring.  There was a skyscraper nightstand that just blew me a way-it was like all the old Fred Astaire movies.  Such CLASS!!!!!!!!!!
I must remember to keep moving-keep getting out in the world-keep seeing

I went to Bills juggling show at Central Library in St Paul-one of the most beautiful libraries I have ever been to.  Some years ago, they re- did the kids room, taking the 1920's puppet theatre out of the old lovely oval room and putting it in the new room...I hated the change-but I always hate change.  I haven't been back since, but today, oh today!!  all the joy of going the LIBRARY the most magical place on the face of the earth-it came rushing back to me.  The framed drawings of Make way for Ducklings!!!  The signed copy of Misty by Marguerite Henry, the old old story books in the reference section with the wonderful prints of illustrations that I loved-Homer Price with his doughnuts falling out of his arms -the real drawing..it stunned me, it moved me, it made me feel so alive.  I have always loved books, but children s books I have such a passion for, such a connection.  It is like going home and it is good.  I re-  resolved to write and illustrate more-even if it is just for me.  Nothing in the world makes me happier.  What a wonderful treat-plus Bill's show was amazing-such a blessing this morning was.

My daughters 19th birthday, and I swear I still wake up in the morning deciding what I want to be.  I wonder if anyone ever feels grown up.  I know I never have. I can pretend to be, but inside I am wondering when the hell I can leave the meeting and paint or draw or read or play.  I still love crayons the best, I think if there is a heaven it will smell like a new box of crayolas.

What I have learned this month is that the less I think about the drawing the better it is.  I have learned I adore charcoal and the way it moves.  I like sketches as opposed to drawings-if I ay sketch it means loose and not 'finished  and makes the looker fill the details in.  I love that.  It makes the looker part of the process, part of the work.  I like to think of people adding their own, there we connect and make a whole.'