My new home could be underneath this Ulu Tree. It's mesmerizing!

Those were the exact words running through my mind over and over again while I tried to sleep. I finally got out of bed and wrote them down. Obviously this was an important message. I’m glad I did that! These words have continued to keep me focused the past few weeks and I’m expecting them to last me the entire year. They are my “words of the year”.

I took just one painting class in college — oil painting. I loved it, but had more fun working in clay, and spent many semesters up to my elbows in “mud.” 

Years after graduating, when I decided to paint again, I dug out my old oils. They still held magic.

Telescopic painting is a painting technique I caught myself doing the other day. To paint telescopically means that instead of watching the paint brush, your eye is watching the part of the painting where you wanted your brush to go. I was painting the horizon line on my Star Struck Mermaid and instead of watching myself paint the line; I was watching the line an inch or so ahead of my brush.

Two professional oil painters recently told me that they are afraid of painting with watercolor. They said that it is too unpredictable and unforgiving. I have heard this before.

In fact, I used to believe that too.

I recently participated in a grueling 3-day tradeshow. It was an experience I am not likely to replicate, but there were a few bright spots.

On the third day, Keanu (hubby) surprised me by purchasing a 10-minute Ho’opono Healing Massage for me. I don’t think of myself as a “massage person”. I don’t have many aches/pains, and honestly feel a bit guilty about receiving massage because I don’t like giving them.

I had been standing on concrete for three days and when asked where my pain was I said my feet and maybe my lower back (I really didn’t have much pain, but they asked).

When I lay down on the table, my right foot cramped, so I asked the masseuse to pull on my toes to make it stop. He proceeded to really DIG into the soles of my feet.

I’m a bit of a bookworm; reading is one of my passions. I read journals, memoirs, novels, how-to books, self-help books, children’s’ books, cookbooks, etc. You get the picture. Recently a friend of mine recommended “The Painter” by Peter Heller, so I got it out of the library (love libraries!). It is a wonderfully well-written story about a painter; and I feel compelled to share a few of my favorite passages with you.

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships...

Yesterday my friend Tamara Moan took me and another friend, Frances Hill, on a trip around Whole Foods in Kailua to teach us the ins and outs of keeping an Artistic Travel Journal.

First I must thank Scott Adams for the cartoon he published earlier this month. Brilliant! I am a sucker for cartoons pertaining to all things art/artist/creativity related. Humor, like creativity, is essential to life.

I've been a fan of Christine Kane'sblog and eZine for about a year. On December 31, 2009, I worked an exercise she offered her readers: The Word of the Year Discovery Tool.