Hey hey, it’s MJ, 

            So a continuation of my hobbies series because why not. I’m still pretty much quarantined and that means that I am crawling up the walls like I am in The Exorcist and I am bored. Now having a hobby doesn’t have to mean you are great at something and guess what we all have different skill level and styles so if you ain’t got nothin nice to say don’t day nothin at all. We all should live by the words of Thumper, seriously the world would be a much nicer place. Back to what this post is about though, I like art I always have and I spent a lot of time in classes doodling in the margins of my notebooks because I was bore listening to someone lecture about a variety of subjects in both high school and college so I would doodle. I like painting, I am not great at it but I like it, I want to acrylic pour because that has become SO popular in the last few years and it’s really cool but like such a waste of paint in my opinion. 

            I love art, art history if I could have done it for a living I would have majored in that in college, I love studying art and looking at what the old masters did. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are my favorites and Vincent Van Gogh is my favorite painter him and Claude Monet, it’s the brush strokes. 

            I am not going to show all of my paintings, because I am not comfortable with that but I am trying to be more open about my creative endeavors and I don’t see that as a bad thing. 

            So I have a wall of painting above my desk and the older one (top left corner) is called “Garden of Whimsey” and it was done in 2017 when I started painting again after college, I was working on my masters at the time so my life was busy and I needed an outlet. I pulled it off the wall and the command strip stayed which is a pain but it was still sticky so here’s hoping that it doesn’t fall off the wall onto my desk. The next one I did was the bottom center and it’s called, “What of the Sea” also from 2017, I don’t know my motivations for paintings they just kind of happen and for the most part most of them are just a, I pick some colors and go to town with no plan. Like “Enchantments” which is the bottom left I didn’t have a plan. “Chaos” the large one on the right was another painting like that where I just went with a palette and went to town. “Say Amen” which is the top center was just me putting the song “Say Amen (Saturday Night)” by Panic At The Disco on repeat and painting what I felt. That one was in the middle of a depressive episode at the end of March 2018 so my head was not in a good place when I was working on that one.

            My mom has a bunch of my paintings which I am not going to share but I can still tell you what they are, my mom loves owls so I painted four owls from reference pictures, I had a vision of a tree in the fall and that also hangs in her bathroom, all of my paintings are in her bathroom which is a little weird but she loves them so I don’t mind. The other one is a winter scene that I wanted to do with alcohol and sharpie for the backdrop but that didn’t work out so I painted it, in again probably 2017. 

            Two more recent projects are a forest scene I painted last year, I am bad with depth so I don’t do a lot of nature scenes because depth in works of art is just not something I have ever mastered no matter how hard I try, I need to take a painting class; maybe after the rona is gone I can. I worked on this one for at least a week because I drew out my idea first and then attempted, is it perfect, no, but do I love it anyway? Yes. 

            This other one is my latest project and my mom has a larger version of it in her bathroom because I showed it to her and she said, ‘can I have it?’ my answer was no so I painted her one of her own. I love sunsets I always have and there are a lot of Facebook painting videos that inspired me to do this one. 

            I actually forgot about this one that I am going to talk about now, I love Mardi Gras masks, they have always been just so cool to me, I have several and my grad party from high school was Mardi Gras themed, I had 35 pounds of beads it was insanity and no one took them so I was left with 35 pounds of beads! Back to this painting though, I love mixed media but I don’t experiment with it like ever so putting a little bit of mixed media in this was a lot of fun. 

            Last set, I promise. I saw this “watercolor practice” on Pinterest and liked it enough that I did my own set. I’m not great with water colors but again, it was fun and for me that’s what art is. 

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            Art is fun, it’s not supposed to be this serious thing that only certain people can do, anyone can make art; art is subjective what you like the next person may hate and that’s totally okay. I like art and there is a lot of art that I don’t like visually, but I can still respect the artistry of the person who created it; the time and effort that go into any piece of art any creation that involves creativity so don’t sit around and make fun of someone’s art because you might be dousing the spark of their creative fire and no one deserves to lose that spark. 

            I will see everyone later in the week with another post, have a good rest of the week!

            -MJ