vanitas. a chasing after the wind.

Again I feel like sharing the world, but like I have no one to share the world with, so I'm sharing it with my dear blog-ary.  Today.  Today I had a full shift at work starting with teaching a class and ending with preparing the store for inventory.  Only one of the three students who paid for the class showed up, so we had a private lesson.  It was a lot of fun.  I wish I could be payed to color and paint all day.  I guess I wish I was my own boss and worked as a professional artist, not just painting or drawing, but continually creating.  Something.  and letting that be enough.  I guess the only problem is that I'm more interested in creating than in selling.  The clutter of creations in my living space is proof enough of this.  I have three good sized paintings on my wall and more stowed next to my dresser.  Under my bed are yarn skeins in zipped bags separated into different crochet projects.  Here there are also two large portfolios and a portfolio sized flat box filled with old drawings and paintings on thin board and printmaking experiments.  These are from high school through college.  I think I still have some work from elementary school in the closet.  Part of me wants to photograph everything I can and put together a brag book for my mom... and partially a book for myself just to visually see the ideas and progress my work as made over the years, over my life.  I have a shelf on my wall dedicated to my hand bound books.  I have a drawing in progress under my desk taped to a drawing board.  A painting in progress is on my desk propped against a wall.  A partially dismantled ceramic sculpture sits on my bookshelf next to my book project on memory.  Precious pit fired ceramic lattice pieces lay in a stack on another shelf below a quizzical ceramic bird.  The rest of my work is on the walls throughout my house, thrown ceramic forms taking over the fireplace and several shelves in the kitchen cupboards.  Yet, it's hard to sell these.  I feel like they are either too precious or too imperfect to part with.  Slowly I'm easing myself into the reality that I can't hold on to everything I make forever.  It's like my vanitas sculpture from 3D design my freshman year of college that I finally threw in a dumpster about a year ago: Vanity, it is all vanity, a chasing after the wind.  Or in specific reference to the piece, "Do not store up your treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy, but instead store up your treasure in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy" (personal paraphrase).  (Though, you know, objects destroyed through moth and rust hold a certain interesting artistic quality to them, a certain beauty.....)