Back to the storyline. Someone dropped off a momma kitty and her three kittens behind my gallery about six months ago. I first noticed momma kitty peeking in my back window and making some really pitiful meows. She took me back to her kittens and they were in bad shape. It was cold, wet, and they were hungry. Of course I made the first mistake everyone warns about, I fed them. Then two days later two more kittens showed up from an entirely different litter. Abandoned by their owners, they found momma kitty and move in. So now there are six cats all needing attention.

Sales have slowed down because of the economy and what is just happening in the world. I am hanging in there just as many, many others are doing. Things will get better and art will be needed once again. I do framing and give lessons in pastel so that has helped take up some of the slack in lost sales. Don’t get me wrong; I am still selling art but not as many high dollar pieces as before. I am painting a lot more 11x14 and 8x10 paintings then I used to paint. They are selling, so that is what needs to be done. Just takes a little longer to make the rent and utilities.

If you do go to my web page, you will see on the “Contact the Gallery” page a picture of my two gallery cats, Roo and Squad Car. I would like to tell you how and why this two little critters came to be my gallery cats and the trials and tribulations of raising two kittens in a gallery filled with art and loose pastels.

We already had three cats at our house. So, I am not a newcomer to the wonderful world of feline psychology. Thank goodness!!! However, if you are a cat person out there, you know that just like snowflakes, there are no two cats alike. They may be the same color, the same size, make the same noises, but their little brains are randomly programmed by some entity who has a very strange and wondrous sense of humor. More later.

All kinds of good news!! I have finished my new web site (www.galleryatspicewood.com) still the same URL as before. I added lots of new art, ways to buy the art, and lots of other good stuff. Check it out. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed building it.

My youngest daughter started the site but she is a busy person now that she got her Phd in Information Sciences. The very first doctor in the family. So I took over the website and started from scratch. I had worked with HTML many years ago, but a lot has changed since then. CSS is a wonderful tool for a website.

I went with Etsy to sell my art rather than the larger and more famous commercial web sites. I found Etsy to be really easy to use, set up, change, and link to my web pages. I highly recommend using Etsy. If you have not been there yet, www.etsy.com will get you there. Almost all of my art is available for purchase on Etsy with many payment options. The main perk is they are user friendly. I like Esty a lot.

I got rid of all the earlier blog entries and this is a new beginning. I want to talk about my gallery and what is going on in my life with respect to selling art.