It's Complicated!...... Identity Crisis?

So this is a really hard post for me.  Maybe if I take deep breaths and waffle on a bit, it will get easier.

 All these paintings (this one, Hanauma Bay 30x40 inches) live at someone else's house now

Darn you!  Old Blog-a-burbia!  What you make me do!!!!!

Grandad's Christmas 30x40 inches

Once upon a time, I was known to certain sectors of the universe as.........a painter.......

except for this one - Chateaurenard 18x24 inches approx

and I spent long hours in hot sweaty rooms.  ALONE.  Or, in January, in cold drafty rooms with scarves around

and I felt saddest about parting with this one because the paint was barely dry when it sold  (Hyde Park 30x40inches)
 I did not get a chance to savor and understand it but the lady who bought it put it against a scarlet red wall which made me very happy

my neck and triple socks and sweatshirts with the sash windows pulled up so the paint fumes would not asphyxiate my cats. 

Then, I moved to the tropics.  And I left the house.  Because.....you don't learn your way around and meet new people who you aren't related to by......you know, mooching around the studio in a state of sweltering undress swatting at the geckos pooping on your paintings and scraping at oil paints in sustained hyper-melt-down.  

Three years were spent happily in the air-conditioned basement of a charmingly denominated stone colonial structure with wide veranda: "Linekona", squeezing wet earthen matter into whimsical forms and eating home-catered Korean lunches of black beans and rice with vinegary-pepper-garlic-soy pickles and gossiping with housewives and hula dancers and ex-neurological oncologists (!) and hunky younger men. (!!!)

um, YES!!!!!  I DID PAINT!   Beaches and sunshine and mountains and trees.

But then there came to be a thing on earth called "BLOG".  And very shortly thereafter an abrupt end to the tropical idyll, and the "painter" found herself in slightly cooler climes unpacking endless brown cardboard boxes, the spare cat, lots of ceramic POTS! and virtual (LARGE) suitcases full of photographs because I had by then been the proud owner of a Sony CyberShot 5.0 megapixels, Lo, several years already!  Being a person somewhat lacking in self-discipline.  (See how I snuck that one in you guys - Scraps of Life are you paying attention?)  And absorbed in an ongoing torrid love affair with the visual world. 

So yes, many many canvases were also unpacked, and boxes of paints.  And they were moved around a bit.  Upstairs and downstairs.  Back upstairs. Around.  (Are they downstairs again?  I think they are, yes.)

And when I was moving them upstairs and down.  I would stop to look out the window.  Then I would take 15 minutes outside with the cats.  Lunchtime would come.  I would look out the window.  And after, I thought....."I should go for a walk!"  So I did.  (I took my camera.)  I would stop to see how the figs were coming along.  I would snap off one or two and eat them on the way home.  White milky liquid on my fingers.  Getting sticky.  I would stop to smell roses. Caress lavender bushes.  Snip off some of my neighbors' rosemary.  Enjoy the view.

Back home.  Inside.  Looking out the window.......blue skies, ocean not so far away, sometimes green mountains. Flowers.  Flowers.  Flowers.  LOTS OF FLOWERS!  SUNSETS..................Residues of a psychedelic era...............

"OH HELL!!!!!!!!!!  WHO NEEDS PAINTINGS!???????"