Another week of reading, watching, discovering things I love,  and working.  It’s been a busy week, and I’ve admittedly been trying to cram too many things into each day, but that is how I usually operate!

Here are my four things for the last few days of April – Getting an artistic talking to, motorbikes across the world, the joys of letting go, and doing work I’m well-suited for.

what I’m reading

I follow Amie McNee on Instagram, and she’s simultaneously my kind of person and not quite my kind of person.  She’s sometimes a little brash for my taste (I feel like she embraces this), but I like her overall message for creatives.  So, when I saw she came out with a new book, We Need Your Art, I decided to get the audiobook and listen to it.  The coarseness from her Instagram feed carries over into the book, but there are enough encouraging gems and nuggets of wisdom that I’ve continued to listen and will likely see it through to the end.  I would much prefer this kind of book over one that talks about creative work in a dry and analytical way!  I also think some people need to hear this variety of exhortation when it comes to owning their creativity and claiming the title of artist.

While a lot of the books I read are ones I wholeheartedly share with my blog readers, this is one I’m still assessing…

what I’m watching

Jeff and I tripped across the adventure documentary Long Way Round several years ago and loved it immediately.  Ewan McGregor and his best friend, Charley Boorman, drive from London to New York on motorcycles, taking the long way through Europe, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska, and Canada.  It’s a journey of friendship, experiencing new cultures, traversing difficult terrain and remote locales, navigating bureaucracy, and seeing the world.  We’re watching through the two follow-up seasons as well – Long Way Down and Long Way Up.  I don’t think those two completely captured the magic of the first expedition, but they are all interesting to watch, to do a bit of sightseeing from your couch.

The next expedition, Long Way Home, comes out in a little over a week.  All of the seasons are available to stream on Apple TV+.

what I’m loving

I have loved letting things go.  I felt a slight pang as I was pulling pieces of ironstone from my collection to sell, but once I had them sold and packed up, I was ready to see them leave.  I’m enjoying the tidy closets, the empty cabinets, and more streamlined displays.  It’s felt good, and I’m looking forward to letting go of more things.

This entire pile, from the French bottle rack to the gold-framed mirror, was all picked up over the weekend, and I’m starting to reclaim my dining room from the organization efforts!

what I’m working on

Yesterday, one of my blog readers left me this comment, “Lol…I am dizzy with you going from the dining room to the basement to painting sales to writing a book, and now back out in the garden!”  Yeah, that pretty much sums up what I’m working on!

(This is one of the oil paintings I finished this week to be sold at Lucketts…)

One thing I enjoy most about the work I do is that it changes from day to day.  It even changes throughout the day as I hop from writing to organizing, to painting, to gardening.  I get to work on what suits the moment, the season, my mood, or my client’s deadlines.  I now marvel at how I worked in an office environment where I did the same thing over and over again.  I understand better why I was so depressed on Sunday nights, knowing the week of monotony was about to begin.

So, yes, I’m working on everything.  I’m writing my book, painting oil paintings to sell at Lucketts, cleaning out my closets, and gardening.

This is the first pass of the painting I was working on yesterday…

In my organizing efforts, I’m trying to clean out some of my larger frames since those are harder to ship.

This needs one more pass to add detail to the landscape and fix any areas on the dog that need a bit of tweaking or more punch.  I’ll preview all of the Lucketts paintings before the sale in case there are interested buyers.