My strokes are much looser, the paint thick, the fan brush remains untouched as I have no desire to remove any evidence of the brush. Smooth and clean, have been aspects of my style for some time. “Loosen up Margaret,” my UIC instructor must have said 100 times. Looking back at the paintings from that unhappy period of my life, I see broken egg shells, broken seashells and dead birds. Though I am still drawn to broken shells and I still photograph dead birds for future work; my shells are often suspended and I have not painted a dead bird in many years. My work overall is much more optimistic. Perhaps because of the large amount of rejection I had experienced at that point in my life, I felt a need to perfect, as best I was able, the image I was creating on the canvas. Only now, in midlife, do I finally feel truly accepted and cared for. Perhaps this is why I am allowing myself to loosen up enough to leave evidence of “the artist” on the canvas.