I can remember back to about the age of (well if I say how young, it might be deemed inappropriate by the blog police, so let’s just say I was super little young), when my father would buy me plastic black 3-ring binders and fill them with 200 pages of blank notebook paper that came in a pack… along with some pencils and some crayons… and I would just go to town drawing. Most of the time, I drew women (even back then). Sometimes they were piano players I would watch on tv. Othertimes, I would draw female figure skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi because I found it was cool to be able to draw their legs sideways and up in the air. I suppose I had an obsession with ass and pussy even back then because I would spend hours shading the women’s asses on the piano benches and filling in the crotches and small breast lines of those little leotards of ballerina dancers and gymnasts (I was a big fan of drawing while watching the Olympics). It wasn’t even a sexual thing, just an admirable appreciation of asthetic beauty from the eyes of an innocent little tyke myself. My sister and I would have impromptu “art contests” where we would time ourselves and then draw the same items and dad would pick a winner. To this day, we still have a competitive streak when it comes to art. (Which by the way, we both did art – I did an architectural ink drawing, she did a graphite pencil drawnig – and entered it in the San Diego County Fair and we both tied for honorable mention. So I guess we’re tied today. No deemed winner.)

From that moment on, I always had sketchpads, binders, journals, canvases, you name it – for writing or drawing. I’m grateful that I attended a magnet high school where I took classes such as photography, art, and journalism classes – along with creative writing… so writing… and drawing, mostly doing poetry while pencil sketching in notebooks was my way of intimately expressing myself. When I moved to San Diego, I painted nearly every single day of my life for nearly 2 or 3 years, often doing a handful of paintings a week and selling them online or doing them for friends or whatever. I never made much money doing it, nor did I want to… there’s something very redeeming and therapeutic about drawing with creative freedom and freestyle flow that is very non-revenue appealing. I did it mostly as my daily hobby, kind of like how some people wood carve or collect figurines or whatever. It was a beautiful time for me.

Then I moved to Indiana and all of a sudden the artistic, creative painter side of me just came to a halt. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel creative. It’s that I had to give away my beautiful H-frame easel because it wouldn’t fit on the moving van. I still miss that easel. Maybe I’ll go put one on my wishlist, although in today’s economy, I can certainly understand if it’s a wallet breaker. Although  I must say… it’ll make my whole year!

So the painting stopped but I still continued to write – usually here on my blog or by writing creative hypnosis scripts, which to me are like intensive storylines with a great amount of creative detail. My dad was disappointed that I wrote less for myself and only wrote for the public (in the past, I always wrote for myself only and had dozens of handwritten books filled to the brim of imaginative ecstasy.)

And then something clicked. It’s like a lightbulb turned back on.

About a week ago, on Christmas Eve, the night before Christmas… I realized I didn’t have a present for Maurice (we had agreed NOT to buy each other gifts this year because of budget cuts, but he had got me stuff anyway prior to our agreement) and wanted to do something nice for him. I went upstairs in the guest room closet and noticed I still had about 15 blank canvases and all my previous paints from San Diego. I laid out some mini flannel blankets that we got from Goodwill and placed the canvas over it and started to draw. It came out of me like fluid poetry. Instead of trying to do something nice, I made an agreement with my fingers to just do what they wanted to do. Get messy. Get angry. Get happy. Listen to music – jazz – urban – classical – opera – jungle music – whatever I wanted. It was freeing, like the opening of a lotus… and three hours later the painting was done and I slipped back into bed without being noticed. Since I used acrylics, the painting dried extremely fast and was ready to wrap and hang on the wall by the time he woke up in the morning.

It was the first painting I had done in probably two and a half years (which for me, is like a century since I used to do it practically every day of my life). And this week, I’ve completed a few more. It’s still weird painting on the floor… the perspectives are all wrong and uneven, but at least I’m getting my hands dirty again. One thing really cool about this is that as all those creative juices start flowing again, so will it affect future hypnosis recordings. (I just finished another erotic hypnosis recording and Maurice is editing it as we speak and adding some sound effects for me so it should be released very soon.)

So here’s a peak at some new artwork that’s up on the walls in the recording studio. Who knows, maybe I can handpaint all kinds of paintings around the house and save some money so I don’t have to buy anything for our bare walls. We had removed every item off our walls in hopes to sell the house to make it devoid of all personality, but now that we plan on staying a bit longer, we’re going to need some creative inspiration on the walls to keep our sanity.

This painting was half-started in San Diego, but completed two nights ago. All the detail stuff was added. The cheeks/lips of the girl on the right still bother me a bit, but still worth hanging on the wall without pulling my hair out trying to correct it.

From left: Swirly painting (from Christmas Eve), the middle one is a guitarist I painted in San Diego, and the one on the right is a multi-media art with pencil, paint, beads, feathers, and gold coins called Hummingbird Goddess.

My sister drew the face and hated it and got aggravated – then gave me the canvas and told me she didn’t want it. I told her I could work on it cause I loved what she did. The photo is blurry and doesn’t do it justice, but it’s very colorful and gorgeous now. It took me 3 things of super glue to get all that stuff to stick.

A closeup of guitar girl, who is naked by the way – but tastefully hidden by the music.

My unfinished symphony — a long way to go. It needs work. So I’m coming back to it a little later. See?? Working on the floor not so great.

I love this quote by Mary Lou Cook. She said, “Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”

How true that is.

Love
Isabella
xoxoxoxo

Here’s a couple screenshots of the video:

Free Video: Behind-The-Scenes
Filmed at home in Bloomington, IN
Size: 256 MB | Format: WMV | Length: 42:30

Love
Isabella
xoxooxxo

I want to thank everyone who reads my blog, whether on a daily or semi-regular basis. It means a lot to me that for the past five years, many people have stuck by me through thick and thin on this journal. It is my goal to maintain this journal for as long as I remain an erotic hypnotist by profession, because the readers (of this blog) know me as such.

I’m here to express that I have recently started a separate journal that is far more reflective than this one. Sometimes I fear of posting things I *really* want to say which involve lots of new age stuff, energy things, and all the transcendental enlightening stuff I’ve been experiencing… because I know the readers of this blog often like to read things that will entertain them, not bore them. So I’ve started a separate blog which many might consider boring and stupid, and that’s ok. It’s a secret blog and is not open to the public, so it’s unlikely you’ll access it anywhere on the net without knowing where to find it. If any of you would like access to it, please email me at isabella@isabellavalentine.com and let me know *WHY* you’d like access to it and why I should let you see it. This is only because this blog contains private self-reflective thoughts and I want to be extremely selective of those who view it.

It will be my pleasure to share the link with those who love mind enlightenment and asking oneself questions about existence and life. I will not be pressured to give the link away, so please do not find offense if I don’t share it with everyone. The most important thing to me is that: those who read the new blog are on the “same page” as me when it comes to energy work and consciousness. If I let everyone access it, then already I feel I have to entertain people instead of just writing from the heart. This is why I’m being choosy. In the blog, I discuss lots of Rumi, space, science, neuroscience, metaphysics, quantum physics, oneness, transcendental methodology, brain stuff, and mind philosophy. It will also contain my agonizing search for love, something I feel completely uncomfortable discussing in this current journal. It’s hard to write honestly about my emotions when I constantly have to live up to a persona that my customers expect. I’d rather discuss my desires and affections in a more private place where I can express myself openly without worrying what other people think, especially customers. It has been my lifelong dream to freely write about my thoughts online without worrying if it’ll result in a loss of finances. To emphasize my redundancy, this is designed for myself, not for an audience.

If you don’t want to read that blog, that’s ok too. I understand it’s not for everyone, and I’m sure it will bore the fuck out of a majority of people. But I thought I’d make it known since I know there are a select few people who really enjoy reading my outrageous thoughts on the universe. Plus I plan on writing a large number of journal entries per day because, frankly, my mind is going crazy without having some sort of outlet for saying these sort of things. It’s more like a diary than a blog. I write for myself rather than for an audience. I need to, otherwise I’ll go insane.

In the meantime, this blog will continue the way it always has. Now I’ll just have two. One for entertainment and sharing myself with you… and one for self-reflection and infinite possibilities.

Love
Isabella
xooxoxox