Kaia Thomas - A path with ART

I realize it has been way too long since my last post. Life has gone and got crazy busy again...busy is getting to be a more frequent occurrence these days and time is beginning to be a precious commodity... I recently completed two mandalas - "Renewel" is an 8" x 10" acrylic painting (shown above) and "Vibrancy" is a miniature 2.5" x 3.5" ACEO acrylic painting (see below) and both are available for purchase in my Etsy shop .  These were painted in a different way then I usually do. I disciplined myself to only two colors (minus the black) and after laying out the mandala drawing, what I would normally do is find particular patterns that I wished to emphasize with certain colors and sometimes painting over lines in the process. With these mandalas, I tried something different, where I kept every line and painting with the rule - no one color could touch itself...so it was like - purple, green, purple, green, that sort of thing. I found...

Ok, so who the heck hit the fast forward button on 2010?? Or the past few years for that matter... I am finding it harder and harder to complete everything in a day - simple things even. This has been the case and getting worse for some time. I think the area of my life that has been hardest hit is in the creation of artwork. This constant feeling of having to race to get stuff done causes a great fatigue which is not conducive to inspiration at all! The creative expression process turns into any other job, which in my book is no good. There are many discussions out there on the subject of time speeding up - a lot of them are related to 2012. The latest doom date to look forward to:) Or enlightening date to look forward to, depending on who you talk to. How I look at it, date or no date, what needs to be done in our lives is still the same. We all have this rather short opportunity here on this planet to experience life, find joy, learn what it means to be this human being and so on....

As I was on the way home from my job this afternoon, I had an interesting experience that I thought might be worth sharing...As I looked to the south I became mesmerized by the beauty of the mountains; the way the light and shadows were playing together and the inviting warm colors of the end of a Fall, desert day. I had that welling up of inspiration to try and capture the moment.   I was tired though, it had been a long work day and I found myself saying "just go home; now is not a good time".  It was then when I suddenly saw how I continuely spoil those magical moments when I could stop and paint or sketch, by feeling that I'm not up for it or that I can do it in the future, convincing myself that I have other more important things to do. I hit the brakes and pulled over. I keep my art bag in the car with me at all times and I pulled out the sketchbook, watercolor travel kit and tripod stool to sit on. 20 minutes later I was driving down the road energized and happy, w...