Another month, another festival! I painted with Ocean and the Black Sheep Circus at Brainquility at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, my all time favorite festival venue. It was a blast! Loved painting with the Black Sheep again, the vibes were super high. Check them out on Facebook and Instagram to learn about the amazing artists in this group!
Ocean put together a sweet display for our prints from upcycled materials. Excited to keep growing and flowing together, creating bigger and better, inspiring the world 🌎
Much love to everyone who stopped to chat with us and admire our art. Painting to Daily Bread and Lazy Syrup Orchestra was so fun! I remember finding their music during the beginning of the pandemic, painting in my home studio and knowing someday I’d be at a festival again, painting to their live set. Talk about manifesting! Dreams come true all the time when you follow your heArt. ♥️
I‘m glad I decided to started blogging again, I think it‘s a better way to express myself fully and share for anyone who wants to follow my journey. For updates on these posts and new art in my shop, I’ll be started a newsletter this summer.
In February I focused on finding balance with my new part time landscape architecture job. It’s been fun making vision boards and digital renderings for each project. It’s exciting to be able to transform the earth and make it more beautiful and full of plant life. 🌱 🌳 🏝
This month the full moon was in Leo. Whether or not you’re into astrology, the full moon has a powerful effect on all of Earth’s water. Our bodies are 75% water, so there’s got to be an effect on us too! 🌊
🌝 Feb 16, 2022 - Full Moon in Leo 🌞
Courage, love, passion, creativity, fun, self-expression, inspiration
🌻 • 🌟 ♌️ 🌟 • 🦁
Have we been worried about doing what’s "right", taking on burdens, tolerating things that don't align with our spirit? Revealing the truth about ourselves can make us feel vulnerable, and that's okay. It's necessary when we are shifting to be exactly who we are. There may be aspects of our lives we’ve been working on... The lessons we've learned from this process have had enough time to settle in. We are ready to be authentic, expressive, passionate, creative, and honest. We are ready to prioritize our own joy.
Mantra: “Shed self-doubt & embrace renewed self-confidence”
Another focus this month was prioritizing my family connections. Family, plus my job, plus art definitely stressed me out at some points! Feeling like I wasn’t spending enough time in any of those areas, spreading myself thin. I practiced forgiveness when I didn’t make it all happen they way I had envisioned. I connected with my baby nephews, played NPR Tiny Desk videos to bring some new music into their lives and keep them entertained with good brain food. Seeing their smiles made it all worth it!
I incorporated yoga into my mornings again, just doing a five minute flow really helps! My flow generally goes child’s pose, plank, chaturanga, downward dog, three legged dog, pigeon pose, warrior 1, 2, 3, and then some leg and hip stretches to cope with the hours of sitting at a computer at work. I definitely feel it when I skip a day. My daily morning yoga practice also got me thinking I should produce some yoga mats! I have a couple paintings that would be perfect for that.
The last weekend of February Ocean and I painted live at the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival! It felt really good to paint in my little home town. My sister and our friends made some great chalk art pieces and the whole fam came out to support! It was a vibe. We painted in front of Los Pancho’s, where my first mural lives.
I painted this mural with my art twin Giovanna Alvarez. She came out to paint with me too and it felt so good to collaborate again! We got a good start on this coyote plant medicine piece. The next photo is Ocean working on our latest collab, a deep sea space portal of sorts. Then there's my dad and one of my nephews, Ozzy. The girl with the 'vitamins' was drawn by my sister and her friend, and the psychedelic alien by Ocean and I's roomate, Chanimal.
What I’m listening to:
February’s playlist starts with some old favorites that I’ve found new meaning in. I used to think Breathe Your Name by Sixpence None the Richer was about a lover, now I know it‘s about Spirit or God. John Mayer’s No Such Thing gets me singing along every time, motivating me on this unconventional artist path I’ve chosen. Open Your Eyes is a song by another festival artist I met recently, Flint Blade. His live sets are great, he loops all the sounds himself. Then Napin Dya, a very spiritual song that grabbed my attention. Ignacio Maria Gomez channels music and sounds from South America, Africa, and the Pacific islands. The words mean everything and nothing at all, a beautiful new language with no rules. Then we flow into a mysterious nocturnal electronic jungle, chill hop and jazz hop, touching on some disco house toward the end and remembering that our power is inside us, that we have so much love to give and receive.
What I’m reading:
This was a super quick and easy read. Definitely not something I would have picked up myself, but my friend loaned it to me and said it had a lot of easy-to-digest wisdom nuggets. I enjoyed Dolly’s perspective for sure and learned a lot about her work ethic. The book is split into sections titled Dream More, Learn More, Care More, and Be More. Solid advice!
Still chipping away at this one. I’ve really enjoyed it so far. Just finished the first section on the opium poppy. It dives into the hypocrisy behind the opioid crisis and the (failed) “war on drugs”, and the benefits and science behind this amazing plant medicine.
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
Looking forward to March! Next events for me and Ocean are Miami Mushroom Fest on March 19 and Miami Music Week, March 22-27. If you made it all the way through this post, leave a comment below 💜
Much love,
Monique