Kat Eye Studio

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Happy Endings

You cannot have a happy ending to an unhappy journey.
–Abraham-Hicks

Wow. Those words are so simple and profound. I read them in one of those daily inspirational emails this morning, and they struck me to stillness.

We are all on a different journey in our lives. Each journey is unique in its challenges and our responses. But there is a universal truth in the quote above: How we approach our journey affects the outcome. Do we approach it openly, with a willingness to learn? Do we feel gratitude for what comes our way? Or do we rail against the unfairness of the universe, wishing things were different and trying to shape things to our liking?

There is a different energy that comes when we force or control than when we accept and learn, don’t you think? Whether a journey is unhappy or happy depends mostly on us, on our attitude, regardless of the circumstance.

Happiness is a choice. Gratitude is a choice. As we head into the holiday season, with all of the potential stresses and joys, I’m going to remember this. I’m going for the happy ending by choosing to be happy on the journey. I hope you will too!

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The Next Step: A Grand Opening

Walking down the path, Oregon

The Green Path

While everyone else was choosing a word for the year back in December and January, I chose a poem: Start Close In by David Whyte. I chose this poem as a reminder that you have to take the first step, to go down any path. And that first step is the hardest. It is full of fear and uncertainty. Full of excitement at the same time.

I’m reminded of all of this today as I take a first step with this announcement: The Kat Eye Studio Shop is open! I’ve opened a shop on RedBubble, where I’ve made selected work available for order as greeting cards, postcards and quality prints of various types and sizes. Whether you would like a matted or framed print for your wall, or a card to connect with a friend through the mail, you can find it here. Just in time to order a few holiday gifts!

Opening the shop is one of those big “first steps.” It’s been on my list of things to do since moving back to the US, but there was so much else I had to get done first:
Start up my classes. Check.
Complete the postcard swap. Check.
Move to a new website. Check.
Figure out how to sell my work. Today I can check that off as well.

As excited as I am for this step, I am nervous too. As with any new venture like this, it brings up all sorts of uncomfortable emotions. Fears that whisper “who do I think I am” in my head. But I’m pushing through, taking the step I don’t want to take, by actually announcing the shop opening here on the blog rather than letting it quietly sit on my site to be discovered. That’s what I really wanted to do this morning – talk about anything and everything else here and hope the shop just gets “discovered.” But I’ve learned over time that things don’t work so well that way…

I hope that you will take a moment to visit the new Kat Eye Studio shop. Let me know if there are any images that you would like to see added. I’ll be working on adding more of my favorites over time, but for today… A first step is enough.

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A Round of Thanks

Colorful flowers and pots in the Corvallis, Oregon farmer's market

Farmer's Market Flowers in Corvallis, Oregon

Now that the website has launched and I can breathe easier, I have a few people to thank for their help in getting me to this point. This was not a solo project in the least!

My graphic/web designer, Eric Zempol of Thick Widget, was fantastic! He was able to take the site I had living in my head, create it and make it even better. While I needed his web design expertise to make the site, his graphic design skills were what I appreciated most. He helped make the site visually pleasing, easy to navigate, updated my logo and educated me in the process. Not only that, he made me laugh along the way. You’ve got to love a sense of humor in the people you work with! I would highly recommend Eric if you are looking for someone to create a WordPress site for you. Thanks go to my fellow muse Holly, aka soupatraveler, for connecting me to Eric.

My husband Patrick deserves recognition for the 350+ blog posts he helped manually edit. Moving from Blogger to WordPress is a daunting task with 715 posts to import! Even with researching and reading and following the best instructions I could find, the posts didn’t import well in terms of formatting. For a while nothing was readable with text and words all overlapping, and an html edit was needed to at least half of the posts to fix the problem. Enter Patrick, who saved the day and edited the html so I could focus on the rest of the content needed to get the site ready. I wouldn’t have been able to launch this weekend without him!

Thanks also go to my friend, writer Munk Davis, for his review of my text and feedback on the writing. I’ve learned the value of editing, working with Munk over time on my class texts, and my writing has improved. He’s a busy guy, so I value the time spent on review of my content. I always appreciate his feedback!

I also must thank graphic designer Renee Rodriguez of Renee Rodriguez Designs. I started the whole website journey by talking to her after I saw a beautiful website she created using the Big Black Bag site. While it turned out that Big Black Bag didn’t have all of the functionality I wanted and Renee and I didn’t work together, she was instrumental in helping me to think about and plan what I wanted in a site. The discussion and pre-work I did with Renee was incredibly valuable as I started working with Eric.

I wanted to take this moment to pause and say thanks to the people who have helped me on this website journey. I couldn’t have completed this project without great people helping me along the way!

Now, it’s time to get focused again on photography. I think I have a few photos to edit and new software to learn around here somewhere…

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At the Threshold of Balance

It’s no secret that over the last two weeks, since returning home from Chicago, I’ve been thinking about balance. I started out by diving into a plan of how to achieve it, but realized that there is a bigger question that has to be answered: What does balance mean to me anyway? I can’t develop a plan for balance if I don’t have a target of what balance looks like for my life.

For me, balance does not mean focusing on any one thing to the exclusion of others. My life is a dance, moving from side to side of the dance floor. Each side has something different to offer, something different it needs. It encompasses so much more than one “thing.” I don’t think there is one word that can capture all of this: Photographer/Teacher/Writer/Engineer/Mother/Wife/Friend. There is no all or nothing.

In my photography, balance starts with deciding what is in and out of the frame before I take the picture. But it doesn’t stop there, it continues as I play around with different compositions and views. I need to remember I’m doing the same in life – experimenting and playing with the elements that make up my life to create a balanced whole. There is no realistic expectation that says we will get it all right and perfect on the first try.  There is no realistic expectation that we will get it all right and perfect, ever. Maybe perfection happens for a brief moment in time, but life is subject to change.

I’m at the threshold of balance right now. Deciding what is in and out of the frame of life. From there I’ll experiment with the details and see how to make things fit in a balanced way. It feels much simpler and freer to think of it as an experiment, where I’m testing to see the outcome, than as a commitment where I “fail” if I don’t get it right.

What does balance mean to you? How do you manage this ever-changing process of achieving balance in your life?

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Why We Need Art


I was so excited last weekend, visiting the Saturday Market here in town. I found the first American image for my market/wheels series! Yay!

When I applied the standard “seventies” processing used in the series to the image, I got chills. I had this amazing realization. This series transcends place and time. All over the world, farmers are bringing their delicious wares to markets on wheels. They always have, they always will. I can go anywhere in the world, anywhere, and find images for this series. I could be in the middle of rural China or my little town of Corvallis and I will find a market. In the market, I guarantee I will find wheels. Within this commonality, I can see the differences too. The unique elements that tell the viewer where I am.

This is why we need art. Art is a way to equalize. Artists find connections, and commonalities. We speak in a language that transcends words. Anyone, anywhere in the world can identify with a piece of visual art. It can move us, bring us together in a way that nothing else can. 

And each of us, with our unique vision of the world, has something to offer that conversation. Whether it’s with a camera or a paintbrush or pieces of glass. Each individual point of view adds depth and dimension to the world we live in. We share our differences, and in the process, find the similarities between us. Don’t you think, if the everyone in the world participated in the conversation this way, the world would be a better place? I think so. I hope you’re joining in too.

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What’s going on around The Kat Eye View of the World…

  • Linking in to Paint Party Friday today, with these two works in progress started this week. I’m loving the colors! I’m picking up some new liquid acrylics in similar colors tomorrow at our new art supply store in town. (Check out the bottom of the page – I’m featured!!) I can’t wait to play with the new colors, and see where they go next.
  • The current Exploring with a Camera theme is The Color Wheel: Part 1. Check out the post and join in the exploration. 
  • Do you want find your unique vision of the world through photography? Registration for the fall series of the Find Your Eye e-course is open! Visit here for more info.
  • You can subscribe to the Kat Eye News to stay up-to-date on all the happenings.

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Fascinations, Part 2

As I mentioned yesterday, one of my latest fascinations is mail boxes! (“Letter boxes” for those of you in the UK.) These are disappearing around the US too, just like parking meters. Replaced by safer and more efficient shared post boxes, these are a bit of life that is going away. I remember the excitement as a child, of putting up that flag when the box had mail and seeing it down later in the day after the postman had come. I would run to see what had arrived in the mail. It’s sad, I don’t even have one in front of my house now. We walk up the street with a key to see what arrived, and it’s usually junk. Bills don’t even come anymore, they are sent via email.

Mail boxes are a symbol of so much else disappearing too, personal mail and the written letter. We all love to get mail but how often do we send it? Not so often. That’s why the Liberate Your Art postcard swap was so much fun for many of us. For a little while, we got fun mail!

In honor of little-used mail boxes everywhere, let’s all send a postcard or a letter or a note to someone we care about today. I’ve got my pen out now! Won’t you join me?

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What’s going on around The Kat Eye View of the World…