Art Break: ‘To Do’ List

I love coincidences. I know I’m supposed to shrug them off as random concurrent events – like rational people do – but I prefer to give them meaning.

I choose to live in a world with unseen forces.

Today I received an email notification about a new blog post from a dear friend. She’s a motivational blogger of sorts and a Christian, and her latest post discussed the unseen force of God guiding her in her daily tasks – in her ‘To Do’ list.

Huh.

Coincidentally, I was planning to publish an “Art Break” post today on that very subject.

'To Do List', oil on canvas, 3 x 2

I painted this 3  x 2 piece for my mother-in-law for her 67th birthday. She gave me several of these tiny canvases some months ago to encourage my painting, but I found them intimidating. I was thinking that I’d have to translate something grand, like a landscape, into something very tiny that could fit into my hand. It was only after I was making a ‘To Do’ list on a post-it note that it occurred to me that I could paint a post-it note LIFE-SIZE on a 3×2 canvas. Neat.

My mother-in-law doesn’t believe in unseen forces save those that physicists recognize. A Richard Dawkins-reading atheist, she has no time for Christian gods and their unseen hands shaping your ‘To Do’ list. And she has even less time for the gods of coincidence that speak to me. No time at all.

She has a labradoodle to walk.

And a garden to weed.

And a yard full of zombies to kill on her iPad.

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