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For someone who's not all that big on Valentine's Day, I seem to have quite a few of these images floating around my brain.
Happy Valentine's Day, again!
Sketched Out

Sorry for the crummy picture. Just wanted to post something recent today. My PC up and died, taking my scanner with it, so posting new work has become difficult. I'm still here, and still drawing, though.
-Claire

I've been working on a painting that will hopefully make it into greeting card format before the holiday. If not, I'll just have a nice little wintry painting. The sketch above is a little teaser from my Moleskine. I'm completing the finished piece in watercolor, 20" x 16".

The birds, the snow, the icicles, my dogs, the trees, the mountains--these have been my personal solace in what has turned out to be a very challenging time for me. Sometimes life throws unexpected kinks into what you thought was a very well ironed-out plan. There is no way to prepare yourself for these shifts and changes. You may even have believed that you were prepared for them, should they ever happen. But no, you were not. The point of these challenges is not preparation; their purpose is to take you by surprise, shake you around, throw all your pieces up into the air and give you a chance to rearrange, realign. Find your meaning as you evaluate each little torn up piece. You pick yourself, tape it all together again. The result is not a new you but rather a fortified you. One that knows it can be shaken, deconstructed, and still come back together in one piece, stronger than before.

Cryptic, I know. It is to me too.

In my own piecing together I have noticed a few things. I have been feeling very poetic. My senses have awakened to the little details; the swishy sound of snow beneath my skis. The taste of dry powder versus heavy wet snow. The movement of an individual flake as it floats down and lands on my glove, where at just the right angle I can see all of its crystalline facets in the light of a street lamp. The smell of wet pine smoke rising from chimneys. The feel of cold below zero as it freezes the tiny hairs in my nostrils. I become overwhelmed by it all and scratch lopsided verses in my journal until I drift off to sleep and dream of my winter wonderland.