A New Year for everything to be loved

 

(Top picture from Iceland residency, bottom picture from Ashfield residency)

I love my blog as a time capsule, to skim through posts and visually see work as well as to read my musings.   It truly is a gift at this time of year to take an account and pay attention to certain standout particulars in my art and life.  However, this year has an irregular appearance almost awkward like a pre-teen, a little of this and that, intense feelings and questions appearing in poems and collages,  paintings about growth, cellular growth...Iceland about self-discovery (recovery?)...my movie completed, Running Still. 

 What was this past year about?

 Rainbow out the bus window on my way to BAER artist residency Iceland

 Rainbow my first day at Wellspring artist residency Ashfield, MA

Reflecting on this question today, the first thing that came to mind was not my artwork but rather this was the first year in 22yrs that I didn't color my hair.  I chose to grow my hair naturally, to live with the color I was born with.  This may at first seem like nothing of importance but I actually think its a symbol of the type of growth I am beginning to experience and maybe my artwork as well.  A sliver of self acceptance. Reasons I never wore my hair brown before was that I didn't think I looked good even my mother always told me I looked prettier with blond hair, changing my hair was like a change of identity, one that was always something more then just me.  Eventually I forgot what color my hair actually was and I became afraid of that.  How could I trust myself when I didn't know anymore what that was?
I think the only way I was able to be willing to try to grow my hair out was ACCEPTANCE of whatever would be, good and bad no longer mattered. 
So perhaps this past year was about growth, a new beginning that seems to be starting from a place in myself that I departed from 22 years ago with a bottle of bleach.
I am really excited to be alive, growing and evolving in 2012.
My wishes for 2012 are that this newly found sliver of self acceptance transpires in my work and that I have the courage to continue opening to what I don't already know, allowing good and bad to fall away so I may be enough as is.  (Please wish me luck.)
My wishes for you are the same, that you experience a time that your truest self shines forth and finds peace in being enough and that we all can love each other as we individually are.
All my heart for 2012 and thank you for being with me.