A New Start - PPF an FFF

PPF – birds

Well my holiday is over and so now I am refreshed and geared up to make 2013 a wonderful year for creative endeavours!

I think my word for this year is FOCUS. I feel the need to focus, as looking over my blog I can see clearly that I am all over the place – many styles, media and unfinished works. I don't want to loose that freedom of styles, but I want to have work that feels like me. At the end of last year I got excited about some paintings I did of flowers that were photographic, and while I felt very clever, there was a part of me that nagged 'that is not you.' So I decided that style can go into my illustration bucket. (Maybe design a set of cards or a calendar?) I need/want to have a more painterly feel to my work. Besides the FFF challenge (see below) I have only done one small painting (6in x 6in) over the last three weeks.

Over the holidays I was reunited with my brother (there was an estrangement for many years). Besides the family photos he has been flooding me with, there have been many photos of birds. He lives in Canberra Australia and has many exotic birds visiting his veranda. It took me back to when we were 13 and 14 when one holiday at our Grands, we went to the Museum in Wellington everyday and he took notes on the stuffed birds on display while I drew them and we made a big book on native NZ birds. So this painting is for you Bro, while it is not as colourful as the birds that visit you, it does me. Birds in Aussie are beautiful, but larger than life. On one visit to my other brother in Perth, I got attacked by a pair of giant magpies when I was going to the local deli. I have never been so terrified, so now I only like sweet little birds.

Fall, Fearless and Fly

The prompt for Challenge 7 is:

Fall Fearless and Fly with Joanne Sharpe! (Check her out at FFF)

Headline Prompt:  Future Imperfect: What is different about your life now than what you once expected it to be?  How is the way it turned out perfect or imperfect.  If your future turns out differently than you imagined in the first prompt, could it still be perfect?
Color Prompt: Yellow
Quote Prompt: "Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present."  Friedrich Nietsche

With the two works I have done I am using all three prompts.

The first is where I am at the moment. I am at peace with my world, even though it is not “perfect”. I did not think my future would be what it is. If you had asked me in my twenties how would I like the life I am leading now I would have shuddered! But life changes you and you learn to go with the flow and see the good things it gives you.

I really believe that life has two sides to everything. Evil and Good, joy and sadness, good health and illness, and so on. We need both equally, because if we didn't life would be boring. How would we know what is good if we didn't have sin? How would we know joy if we didn't have sadness? The imperfections of life give us our depth of character. I know that when something bad happens, there is going to be a silver lining. We may not see it at the time but it is there. So I embrace the imperfections of my life, they make my life perfect.

In the second picture I tried to portray the times when the glitzes in life hit. They bring colour to our lives.

Linking with

Paint Party Friday

FallFearless and Fly