Nellie Windmill

I’ve been thinking about my blog content these last few days. Feeling torn between all the different topics I blog about. Knowing that some of them need a bit of love while others are kinda needy and should back the hell off. I’ve been participating in a couple of online groups that have really sucked up all my blog real estate – In December it was Gwen Bells’ “Best of 2009″ and now it’s Andrea’s “Creating Dreams Come True”. All good stuff but I’ve been neglecting the art and travel posts. My partner, Mike and I have started travelling again after our 2 month hiatus in Hammamet, Tunisia, which got me thinking about how on earth I’m going to keep up with the blogging. Then, just yesterday I met two artists, gave them the URL for my blog and later realised that I don’t in fact have any of the art work I’ve created in the past 2 months on my blog! It really is a shocking state of affairs. One solution would be to simply blog more often but I actually want to live my life rather than just write about it. So, I’ve committed to keeping some sort of balance. I’m going to back off on the Creating Dreams posts and re-direct my blogging efforts to my art and travels more.

To kick this new direction off, I’ve posted THE painting that made me go oh, THIS is the stuff I want to paint. I’m a newbie in the art world and I’ve been dabbling in various styles. This piece was very much inspired by the work of groovy Italian artist Nicoletta Ceccoli. I love how outrageous she gets with her paintings and I’m aspiring to such levels of outrageousness. I wanna come up with some really weird shit. There are quite a few new paintings that I want to share with you guys but I’m going to post one at a time and comment on each.

My next post will be about our travels. I still haven’t finished posting about our time in Sicily and will have had three weeks of traveling in Tunisia under our belts by then so there’s going to be a lot of material to work with.

Overall, I think having too many interesting things happening in my life to blog about is a very good problem to have. However, with my new found direction and discipline I hope it becomes a bit clearer to everyone what this blog is actually about.

This week’s Creating Dreams Come True assignment is making a “This Is My Life List”. I think my favourite part of this exercise was visualising how I want each area of my life to feel. It forced me to be specific about what I wanted and what I felt was lacking in each area.

A real sticking point I had with this exercise was the life area of “Abundance”. I suspect this is one of those words with a fuzzy definition and wildly varying connotations, depending on who you ask. I’ve never really thought about abundance before so, like a good little Bachelor of Arts graduate, I decided I needed to define it first. My definition (straight out of the dictionary) is: “plentifulness of the good things of life; prosperity”. A great inner tug-of-war ensued between the two opposing values of abundance and simplicity. On the one hand, I don’t really desire “plentifulness” but rather “enough”. On the other hand, I’ve included things on my Big List of Dreams that fall into the abundance category, such as the killer wardrobe I desire. Of course, I have “enough” clothes right now but that doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with what I’ve got. I think in the end I managed to find a harmonious balance between the two. I’m certainly not aiming to live like a monk but the mindless pursuit of more stuff didn’t find it’s way onto my list either.

You probably noticed that I only have one task for each life area (with the exception of the Creativity area which has a whole action plan). I’m going with the principle that “lack of time is actually lack of priorities”, and have just gone with one task that I think will make a big impact in that area of my life. Once I’ve achieved them I’ll add more but for now I’m keeping it simple.