If you have been following along before I even started this blog, you might remember that this past May, my work was shown in a gallery in Brenham, TX along with the work of my best art friend, Olivia Nucci! The show ran through the month of May, and then was moved to the bed & breakfast connected to the gallery for the months since. While I was down at The Farm over Labor Day weekend, I stopped in Brenham to pick up the remaining pieces from the show, which are now available for purchase on my site. 

In this digital world, we take in a lot of material on an everyday basis. From tweets, to posts, to that funny video of a dog that your cousin posted on Facebook, there is a lot of information coming at us. It can be hard to decide which sources to trust, and which to dismiss. Over the years, certain sources of information of all kinds have risen to the surface, and I'm sharing with you which sources, both online and in print, that have proven to me their reliability and dependability. 

The Wall Street Journal :: My parents began subscribing to the WSJ, in addition to the local newspaper, while I was in high school. I began reading the papers along with them, and it's a practice that has solidified itself in my morning routine. One year in college, I'd expressed to my parents how much I missed having the newspaper to read every morning in the dorm, so once I moved out of the dorm, my big Christmas gift that year was a subscription to the WSJ. And to this day, despite lighthearted teasing of my roommates and now my husband, I still read the paper every. single. morning. 

        Today I'm featuring some of the art & artists that inspire me. These guys are too good not to share!

Teil Duncan :: Teil was my first artist crush. She was cute, young, and an incredibly talented artist. I wanted to be her. I still want to be her! I have been following along as she has grown bigger and bigger, and I'm continually inspired by the ways she continues to push herself with new techniques, and new subject matter. I already know I need her to paint portraits of my kids...once I have them, of course. Her beach series will always have a special spot in my heart - she is able to capture a landscape perfectly, but without fussing about the details. 

While the paintings from The Color of My Sky will certainly look great on the walls of your home, why not bring some of those wide open spaces of the Texas countryside to your mobile device? For those who have a phone, a laptop or a tablet (or maybe all three!) I've created digital downloads that you can use as a background for your favorite device. I usually keep these exclusively for my email subscribers, but today I am bringing them out in the open for anyone to use! 

When it comes to feeling nostalgic, I’m the biggest sap you’ll meet. My bulletin board is full of little bits of paper, old tickets, and sweet notes that I have collected throughout the years. I LIVE for the “5 Years Ago” posts that automatically show up on my Facebook feed. And there are days when I look at Austin and say, “Can you believe that we’ve been married for four months? Four whole months?! I remember our wedding day like it was yesterday…” Lol.

My bent towards nostalgia, though, is a driving force of my art practice. I have the tendency to long for the past, whether it’s a place or a person. I’m not talking about a casual, “I’d love to go back to Italy someday.” or “Aw, I miss her!” No, I’m talking about a longing inside of me so deep, that sometimes I think I can literally feel my heart being pulled towards where it is I want to be. When I read this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal, there was an article on nostalgia (in relation to interior design) that I felt best explained the nostalgia that I experience:

Have you ever gotten into the car, and driven halfway to your destination realizing that you’ve been driving in silence the whole time? Believe it or not, this happens to me quite often. Once I hit the road, I quickly lose myself in my thoughts and decompress from the day. Its like my car is this safety bubble where I can shut the world out and truly be alone with my thoughts. I think it’s true that we all have places where we do our best thinking. I find that it’s rare when I can find a period of time to let my mind wander and let my best thoughts bubble to the surface.

I often wonder why it is that this is hard to come by, and why letting my mind wander is something that I don’t even notice happening until it ends. It’s in these times, however, that some of my biggest and best thoughts rise to the surface. What I’m sharing today are my favorite places to lose myself in thought. These aren’t necessarily intentional choices, but places where I happen to find myself thinking all the good thoughts.

I’ve written before about how I transformed my mornings into the most productive time of my day with one important tool: a morning routine. I’m a pretty low key person, but my morning routine is the time of my day that is nonnegotiable . In fact, my morning routine is so important, that I will wake up extra early just to fit it in. 

I typically factor in an hour and half of time to prepare myself in the morning before I need to be wherever it is I’m going for the day. I’ll tack on an extra 45 minutes to an hour if I am working out, which most mornings I try to do. If I don’t get my exercise in in the morning, it proooobably won’t happen later in the day. My theory is that my mind isn't awake enough to tell me not to. Ha. Immediately following my workout, I take my dog, Murphy, for a quick walk around the block. The newest addition to my routine is brought to you by my brand new life as a married woman. In what I have been told is the true sign of moving into “adulthood,” I have to spend a large chunk of my morning watering the flower beds in my front yard. Let me tell you, I will never take a sprinkler system for granted ever again.

One of the most valuable skills that I learned at TCU was how to build and stretch my own canvases. It was one of those tasks that seemed a bit burdensome at first, and I could tell many stories of my epic building failures. While I am still refining and streamlining the building process, I would consider the ability to build my own canvases one of the most impactful attributes of my artistic practice not only for the quality, but for the customization of sizes, which is great for commission work!

The first time I painted on canvas that I’d built myself immediately put all other store-bought canvases to shame. The texture is unmatched. Store-bought canvases have a rougher texture that can appear plastic-y on the finished painting, but the ones I build have the right balance of texture and smoothness, and have a beautiful matte quality. Another quirky factor that I love about hand built canvases is the bouncy-ness of the canvas. I can control how tightly I stretch the canvas, and the slight bounce in the surface contributes to the movement of the scene that I eventually paint. Store-bought canvases are much stiffer and have much less give, so that is one more quality that makes hand built canvases invaluable.

She’s the It Girl of The Color of My Sky. She’s bright and unafraid of sharing her personality. Everyone wants to have her on their walls. Who is she? She is ‘Girl Crush.'

The first words that come to mind when I sneak a glance at this painting is, “Holy PINK!” The process of this painting was certainly a study of my favorite color. When working with such a bright and vibrant palette, I learned that a little goes a long way. If you look at the painting a little longer, you’ll see that there are ranges of blues, purples, and even some aqua colors that balance out the range of pinks and magentas. I loved exploring both the warm and cool ranges of pink, moving from a warm, salmon-y pink all the way to a cool, deep magenta. I learned that you can indeed create areas of light and shadow with the color pink, and still formulate a realistic landscape scene, despite the color scheme.

Ask anyone who has been with me in the first hour after I wake up and they will tell you: I am NOT a morning person. From my parents, to college roommates, to my husband, they all know how it goes. Anything involving light, sound or human interaction is off limits for the first couple hours after waking up, no matter how late I've slept in. 

In my college years, however, I learned that this reality had to change. My painting class was always scheduled at the same time: Monday & Wednesday, 9am - 11:50am. Three hours of morning studio time. Three hours to be productive and get the work done. At first this was difficult to adjust to. You mean I have to get my most important work done this early in the morning? I have to be my most inspired just after waking up?

I soon started to develop what is now the most important, and honestly, my most favorite part of the day: my morning routine. While the specifics of it have changed with the rhythms of life, establishing a routine helps put my mind in the right space to make the most of my morning, as well as the rest of my day.