This pandemic has brought about a lot of changes. Some of them pretty awful but not all of them.

One of the things that shifted for me was that I committed to painting again. If you know me, you know that I used to do these 100 day painting challenges and for a long time, that was my flying girl series. (You can still get prints of the flying girls on https://www.redbubble.com/people/rowenamurillo) But after coming down with a chronic illness, I found I'd lost my energy and inspiration.

During the pandemic, when everything seemed to stop, I decided it was time to get back to my own work. It coincided with homeschooling my teens. Every day before school, I went into my studio and painted for fifteen minutes while they did their journal writing.

When I'd built that painting time into my day, I decided it was time to start a 100 days of painting challenge when I found it on instagram. That worked well. Oh the art didn't work that well. My painting hiatus had erased my inspiration and I'd forgotten what I wanted to paint and sometimes it felt how to paint as well.

But, painting every day felt GOOD. And in the time of the quarantine, finding something good was essential. So I did another 100 day challenge. And then another. And by the end of the year, it was 300 days of painting, and an intention to start a new year and a new challenge of 365 days of painting.

So here we are, while I write this, and it's half way through 2022. I've hit 200 days so far, which means 500 days in total, and I don't plan on stopping.

One thing this challenge has done is allowed me to explore abstract painting. Which is NOT as easy as it looks. In my life of painting, I've never been able to settle down and really dig into abstraction, but finally I am, and it's very exciting.

I have a huge archive of paintings now, and am ready to start selling them, making room for more development, and hopefully even larger paintings, and all sorts of other advancements.