Walking through the next door

Being a Sunday painter is frustrating. I painted one picture on Sunday (that I'm not posting yet, because it's a present for a friend and I don't want to ruin the surprise). Then I started a second one, but I ran out of time/light, and didn't get to finish it. All I wanted on Monday morning was to go back out on my patio and finish the painting, but instead I had to go to work.

What really needs to happen is that I need to upgrade my eyeglass prescription so that I can see better to paint at night indoors and don't have to restrict myself to Sundays in perfect daylight on the porch. Or, I need to quit my job and make my living as an artist. Right. Not quite yet.

First of all, I don't feel ready as an artist to charge for my work. I post it, I give it as gifts, I frame it and hang it in my house, I keep it in a portfolio. It's not quite stranger-ready, though. I feel like there's so much more to do, to learn, to practice, to develop--a style, an idea of who I want to be as a painter, what I want to share.

Second, if I were going to do it, I'd want to be in a position to really commit to it, because...

It's one of those catch 22s--my cousin said to me recently, Why don't you just get an Etsy page like everybody else, and sell whatever you paint? But working full-time as I am, that's a twofold issue: 1. I don't really need the money because I have a full-time job; and 2. since I do have that full-time job, all the stuff that would go along with the Etsy page, like scanning, pricing, posting, communicating, matting, shipping, following up--all that is too much to do on top of working full-time (especially if I'm also supposed to have time to paint--hello?).

So--I think the first step is to get better glasses, the second step is to paint a LOT more, and the third? That can wait for awhile.