#MyProject70

Greetings from Matinicus Island, Maine where I'm thinking about my art as a whole for the first time in 27 years. That's when I started to paint and couldn't stop.

In the beginning, I thought I would become a portrait painter. I got fairly good at it, but after painting my kids and my husband and my friends and my friend's kids and selling a number of portraits, I found the work not only unprofitable, but very tedious.

So next, I painted plein air landscapes. That was fun, but until 2007, we owned a garden center, so in all good weather I was busy, and painting outside in crummy weather wasn't my thing. Fortunately, I escaped all that when we would close the business in the winter and go to Morelia, Mexico.

In Mexico I painted everything and I found a lot of encouragement both from my instructor at the art school I attended for years, from my neighbors, and from strangers who saw me paint. There

is so much more color in Mexico relative to New England, and I began to realize that it was color that I cared about most -- the loud vibrating kind. I developed a secret desire to paint without regard to subject. But I had trouble giving myself permission, plus I didn't have any idea how to do it.

Then, in 2014, when I was about to turn sixty, I decided to quit painting altogether until I had an idea of how to paint abstractly. To feed my color addiction, I knitted crazy-colored baby hats, and to fill my time (by then my husband was teaching in Mexico, our youngest daughter was attending school there, and I was painting full time), I wrote a novel (never published). It took about a year before I hit on the idea of painting geometric abstracts based on my early quilting experience, and that's what I've been doing since. Happily! Almost.

I have never been able to make any significant money with my art, and I've been conditioned to think I should. It's the American way! So starting in 2019, I signed up for two different courses with the objective of getting my work into galleries. That, I was sure, would solve the problem. Both courses advised creating a website and posting daily on social media. But the directive was to only show work that represents current, consistent work that a gallery could depend on me for. Work that could be produced in quantity.

I complied. I made this website, I researched galleries in Mexico, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine -- the places I paint. Quantity? No problem. I'm a producer! Daily social media? I love a daily challenge! Results? Not zero. But lucrative? Don't make me laugh.

These days my husband and I are living six months in each country and when in the US we're in equal parts New Hampshire, Maine, and visiting our kids in three other states. I blamed our schedule, the lack of consistency. I was becoming unhappy. How would I ever sell my work?

But this April, as I was leaving my house in Mexico which is small but with very tall walls that are covered with the last twenty-seven years of my art, I thought, I really can't show all these paintings to anyone? I'm going to turn seventy. What will happen to it all? It will just be passed out to neighbors and friends when I die and I won't even get to watch. At seventy do I really want to start working for a gallery? How will that fit with our travel schedule? And what about my creative impulses outside geometric abstract work? No grandchildren portraits?

So I gave up my gallery goal, instantly felt lighter, and I came up with #myproject70 which will gradually unfold as I get closer to my birthday in November. The first part is posting daily sets of four of my paintings on Instagram.

The sets are tied together only by color -- combining sizes, styles, places, and dates. It's a challenge and it's fun. Then I post the four on my Facebook page where I have different friends from on Instagram. They vote on which of the four paintings they like best. It's great fun to see who likes what. And the comments are thoughtful. Then I post the photos here on my website. And for the time being this is my art gallery and I'm happy to be here.