36. How it all began

Dancing asparagus I hear you say, mmm…well moi have always been a little bit crazy and that probably is and asset when you are an artist! Lol Anyway this painting was the first one that I actually painted, on canvas that is.

You see I was pregnant with my first child and was getting the house ready for this little bundle of joy (and as it turned out he was too) I asked my brother who is a very good artist if he could paint me a mural on the nursery wall.

So he came and started, laid down the background of grass and hills and a sky with the start of a train running through the country side. However at the time he was the drummer in a band called Clowns of Decadence, and they had a very strong following and were always out on tours. So I would be calling Matt up and asking when he would be back in town, and it would be” oh sorry sis, we are touring New Zealand now and won’t be back for a month.”

In the meantime I was getting fatter and fatter and fatter, and being a bit of a perfectionist there was no way that my baby was going to arrive with an unfinished nursery.

So I thought to myself there is nothing to do but roll up ones sleeves and get on with it and start painting .

Now there were a couple of things wrong with that idea, one was that I had some complications with the pregnancy and should be mostly having bed rest. The other was that I could not paint my way out of a paper bag! I mean that literally, you see both my father and my brother are fantastic artists, very skilled and can do anything, whatever I had ever tried to draw or paint was usually laughed at, well not in a mean way but probably slightly mixed with pity lol.

On top of that during my school years in Sweden I would be receiving maybe an F for Art, I remember distinctly having to paint a still life; fruit bowl and mine was very hard to figure out what it was. Us naive types find it very hard to see perspective (and hey maybe we don’t want to, maybe the world is just better when everything is close and within your grasp!) In those days you were only considered good in art if you could reproduce something like a photograph. So therefore I had not drawn or painted for years.

But as I was a woman on a mission and nesting, watch out! I got the paints out that my brother had left and off I went, and you know what, with an eye blink it was lunch time, too busy to eat. Kept on painting although I would lie down on the floor from time to time and look at my handy work (doctors orders you know) I blinked my eyes again and now it was night.

The next morning I woke up, feeling so very excited and energetic and I did not know why, I was 8 months pregnant and usually exhausted, so I laid there and tried to figure it out. Well you know what, it was LOVE, I had fallen in Love and not with another man, no with painting. I did not care what anyone else thought of my handy work, but I loved it, I loved painting it and I loved looking at it.

That was how it began, I will tell you another time how ” that “ led to ” this.”

So take heart you budding artists out there, don’t let anyone say you can’t and that you are no good, if it makes you happy then DO IT.

This saying by Winston Churchill fits very well here;

“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”

Love Marie (c)

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