Blog beginning - part 2.

I've just found this thing for the first time since August. I've been busy.

So this is more of the first entry, the other first one didn't count.

I'll give the biggest points of info.

I left the insurance industry around September of 2007. I gave up a gigantic paycheck, fantastic benefits, a 401(k), happy hours paid for by underwriters, and random free sandwiches during the occasional lunch meeting.

What did I get in return? Longer hours, COBRA coverage that expires in January of this year at a price of $463 a month, knowledge of how to save money by cutting my own hair, a crash course in making ends meet, and the abandonment of the dream of ever owning a house, name-brand groceries or a Wii.

Yet, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world - I became an artist full-time. I've holed myself up in a tiny bedroom that has been converted into a studio, got my giant easel up to Philly from Virginia (thanks, mom), and painted my damn ass off. Slews and slews of paintings and drawings later, it's finally coming together a little better. My website (www.mollyharrington.com) will be up soon, thanks to my Dad's wonderful offer to develop it. I may be a starving artist, but had it not been for my patient, kind, generous and non-deserving-of-my-bullshit friends and family, I'd be either in a dumpster somewhere or pursuing a side career entertaining people ala Ashley Alexandra Dupre.

I'm doing lots of landscapes in oil, but am increasingly drawn towards abstraction and non-figurative work, particularly in acrylic and watercolor, as of late. My strengths lay in portraits, which are slowly paying the bills. Portraits are almost always done in pastel, charcoal and pencil, I'm just happier with them that way. I love love love love LOVE color, but I've been increasingly interested in sepia and charcoal images heightened with chalk. If I had it to do all over again, I'd go take a couple of years and study in the Atelier movement, focusing on drawing and building toward painting. I can't stop staring at anything that has come out of Atelier-trained students.

Finally, I'm looking forward to what the next few months and years bring. After two years in the corporate world, I was at the point where I was having daily panic attacks, doing work that I hated, trying desperately to fit into a world that I innately was never a part of, crying at the drop of a hat, going to therapy just to get through the week and literally making myself sick, it's a welcome change to be excited about one's future. I actually am sad to go to bed sometimes because I've enjoyed my workday so much, I don't want it to end. Yeah, that's a little hokey, but whatever. Deal with it.