Madness and Mayhem

Life has been a blur the past few weeks! Since I last posted here on the blog, my days have been filled with Caden’s play dates, a birthday party, 2 Medallion parties, family visits, baseball, shopping trips, gardening and landscape projects, a brief gig as a substitute teacher at Caden’s pre-school as well as a painting competition deadline that I almost didn’t make due to the afore mentioned chaos and a killer sinus infection that I am STILL suffering from! It has been HECTIC to say the least!

But I am happy to report that most of my landscape projects have been completed and the new plots are already sprouting up with wild green abandonment! Sadly, the vegetable garden was planted too soon and didn’t fare well under the last frost, but the plants that didn’t make it have been replanted, the new seedlings have come in and we are now looking forward to a similar crop success to last year’s garden. This year I reworked the row plan in the vegetable garden, giving the plants a bit more room to grow in hopes of lessening the jungle like suffocation from last year’s arrangement and also added a stepping stone path and a decorative stone wall to enhance the overall vegetable garden experience.

Last year’s *Potted Plot* has been moved to our gigantic stone pile (next to the vegetable garden) transforming it into what I am now calling my *Rock Garden* (it’s SO Fred Flintstone!). The transformation included repainting the 14 flower pots a deep stone gray and using the leftover stone wall stones to pave the spaces between the pots. The pots have all been planted with one species of Cactus-Flowered Zinnia which I determined was my absolute favorite from last year’s Zinnia selection (the Zinnias supposedly have the added benefit of acting a deer deterrent).

Speaking of the deer, I also reworked last year’s Sunflower plot (which ended up as a tasty treat for our deer by the 4th of July!) and turned it into a Wildflower garden instead with hopes that the deer will not eat up my lovely driveway side feature again. Unfortunately, after completing the new Wildflower plot (formerly the Sunflower plot) I realized that I still had six jars of sunflower seed collected from last year’s crop! I decided I couldn’t let the seeds go to waste so they HAD to be planted. That involved finding a new space to have a sunflower garden and digging out six forty foot long rows in what is now referred to as *The Sunflower Terraces*. I practically broke my wrist with that last venture but I’ve dreamed of having a sunflower field as long as I can remember so I had to give it another try, right? I did keep in mind that I was probably only planting more deer food but… a girl has dreams.

The Mr. also completed a special project for Caden, creating a fabulous forest playground by moving Caden’s swing set up into our back woods. It was quite the project involving heavy lifting, tree cutting, cement mixing and other manly construction stuff, but I think it was well worth it as Mr. C’s playground has been met with rave reviews and boasts the best view on the property. When he’s swinging he imagines himself flying into the horizon, we just hope he doesn’t really go flying off his swing, smacking into a tree!

Anyway – so that’s the madness and mayhem that has been keeping me away from the blog. THAT and a new painting that I have been working on for the past few weeks. As I said, I did in fact make the first of many deadlines on Friday June 5th but it was not with the piece I had planned on submitting. At first I was at a loss as to what direction to go in, I couldn’t decide whether or not to begin a new Wildflower painting series or to open up the *Long Term Project*, so instead, I created a piece based on what I’ve been thinking about (and working on) the past 5 weeks and ended up with a fanciful *fairytale* version of our house and meadow (which oddly enough, I have often referred to here on the blog as “The Living Painting”). I’m thinking this painting might work as an introductory piece for my upcoming “WILDFLOWER MEADOW” exhibition, serving as a visual biography of the inspiration behind my floral paintings (with the inclusion of a few other elements as a hint to possible new paintings to come).

I desperately hope to finish the current piece in the next day or two so I can focus on creating new paintings in the Wildflower genre for the upcoming AVA competition (Deadline June 20th) and the annual Plainfield exhibition (Deadline July 2). After that, I have the annual Cornish Art Show in August and then my solo exhibition “WILDFLOWER MEADOW” going on at AVA in October – so lots and lots of painting to be done! Oh my! It is going to be an extremely busy summer!

Obviously time is limited but I will catch you up on the Exalted Beauty Medallion Party Reports soon and I will also post photos of the recently completed landscape projects and share what’s currently growing on in the meadow as soon as I get a chance to breathe! Stay tuned!