December 3 – 9.

Hi everyone, happy Sunday! This past week was the best yet for evachristensenart – thank you so much for reading! I love writing, and I love having a forum to share my thoughts, but I get even more satisfaction from knowing that people are actually taking the time to visit and see what I’ve been up to. I feel like I’m getting into a routine as far as the writing, and trying to stick to a schedule of sorts for creating and publishing and being consistent and productive. In case you missed it, check out what I painted this week, my post about my first art teacher, and a day in the life post. 

Last weekend and early this week our house came down with a cold and it was pretty cold outside too. I was surprised I didn’t feel lazier than I did. If dog walks can be a bit of a bar we still got out for six out of seven days this week, so my dog guilt was pretty low (more like a steady 3/10 – I mean, it’s always there even at low levels). I find my energy and output comes in waves… I’ll often have a few really good weeks – checking all the boxes: going to the gym, meal planning, meeting all the animals’ needs, waking up early on weekdays to curl my hair before work, making time for art. And then I’ll often crash into a standalone week where it all seems to fall apart and I just feel defeated by it all and it’s hair back and glasses and chips on the couch in the evening for way too many days. Luckily, that was not this week!  

Happily, I worked on Big Beesa way more than I expected this week. When I was in the middle of painting her this past Thursday I was full of doubt for quite a bit worrying that her pattern wasn’t defined enough and that I was veering off course. I find that taking a step back and even taking a picture midway through and looking at that instead of directly at the canvas can help to kind of change my perspective. I love the direction that the painting is going in now, but I’m a little nervous that there is still room to screw it up. I probably won’t be feeling secure until I have a little more of her fur and pattern done. It’s a little tricky. 

I did not paint Wiggis even though I intended to. Something is bothering me about this painting. It may very well be that I simply haven’t spent the time to get over those initial feelings of doubt and awkwardness but I can’t shake that there is something wrong with it. Sometimes there may be a design flaw that is simple enough to fix (and which makes all the difference in the world) but I haven’t really solved it yet. Stay tuned. 

I don’t think I’ll be going back to Wiggis for a bit anyway. I took this great photo of Beesa (demanding food) on the weekend and I think this will be the final painting in the Beesa series. I just love the idea of making this a triptych. I can’t wait to create the sketch this week (maybe today!) and get started. It will be 24 x 24″ just like “This is a cat” and “Big Beesa” will go in the middle at 24 x 30″ so everything will be balanced really nicely. 

On Friday my husband and I helped out with a fight night our gym was promoting at a club downtown. I was completely destroyed on Saturday morning. I lost my voice from cheering on our gym fighters and I felt like I was so slow all day. I got into kickboxing for fitness quite a few years ago now, and had a (very!) brief career as an amateur fighter in 2017 lol.

It still gives me a lot of personal satisfaction to train with our competition team, help out with the events, and cheer our friends on. We ordered pizza when we got home close to 1 am, and shared the crusts with the dogs. I ate waaaaaay too much, felt guilty, and combined with waaaaaay too little sleep I was a walking zombie yesterday. 

So, we had a quiet Christmas Saturday. Finally got our tree from the Sobey’s parking lot tree lot. We had the experience of cutting down a tree at a farm our first year in this house. We drove there and back in a snowstorm, took Clicquot who was shivering and crying the whole time, and it was cold and honestly a miserable experience. We also got a Clark Griswold tree – it was way too big, we totally overestimated how tall our living room ceiling is and underestimated the size of the tree itself, and we had no room for a star. So, not a very authentic experience buying a tree in a parking lot, but honestly this is our best one yet – perfect size, and it finally looks like we have enough decorations for the tree. And surprisingly enough – the cats have no interest in the tree whatsoever which is nothing short of a Christmas miracle given their love of destroying everything else in the house. 

Plan for this week: More work on Big Beesa, sketch screaming Beesa, wrap presents, and lots of dog walks. I’ll be checking in on Thursday with more about my week. Watch out for posts all week long. 

Thanks for reading everyone! Have a great week 🙂