Because of all the other stuff happening around here lately, it looked like I was not going to get to donate a painting to the George Washington Carver Museum this year for their community education fundraiser. More and more, I have found myself needing to pare down not just our possessions, but some of the activities we do as well. I was quite sad about this since I have been doing this for several years now and have always enjoyed sharing my work for such a great cause. Well, it turned out that the deadline to submit paintings got extended to the end of the month and I got to do it after all. Yay for second chances!

Generally, I am a pretty traditional artist, but this year, I felt like mixing media and going 3-D for a change. I wanted to use up some nice card stock that I had from sample folders for products no longer offered by Mary Kay and got the idea of cutting it and forming it into shapes. I played around with the shapes, attached them to my acrylic-painted background and got this result:

Abstract was never a style that I felt really at home with, but somehow, this piece ended up going in that direction. Sometimes, it is difficult to predict how a painting will turn out and other times, it ends up looking just like the the little picture in my head that gave me the idea in the first place. This one was definitely the former and it was also one where I felt much more influenced by ideas and feelings outside of myself than usual. It is titled “Heart Ablaze” and I am still not quite sure how I feel about about it, so I would welcome comments and/or feedback.