Trying to organize my thoughts and creative impulses

In the past three days I have started preparing at least 5 canvases of varying sizes with a distinct spacial constraint in my work space. I'm juggling drying space with two easels on which I work with either painting or waiting for something to dry just enough before I continue working on it. Overall I am building backgrounds, though technically the works as they progress can be abstract explorations in themselves.  could leave them as well enough, but the premise is unsatisfying and weighs as intellectually lazy on my part considering I have several concepts which I have been toying around with. The intersection between my starting such a big workload in such a short time given my sporadic art making schedule is I am starting many surfaces and I am not certain or completely oblivious to how I am going to finish each artwork. I generally have two series of works which I have been working on recently or researching to work on; Idle/Idol Worship, and basically making works generated from a pool of artists whose work I admire. Both of these ideas generate several lists in how I will explore each concept.

Idle/Idol Worship was a concept which emerged from the sort of celebrity worship which starts in the teenage years with an unchecked zeal and fervor, but wanes over time. As an adult I keep that impulse in check to some degree, but I still have several favorite actors/actresses, singers, performers and celebrity individuals. My students do as well. They plaster their notebooks with printouts and cut outs, draw pictures of them for class projects, have stickers, and basically make small sort of shrines to them in their belongings. In this idea, I have been looking at the celebrities which I have followed overtime, and taking that similar kind of "celebrity worship" and juxtapose it with different religious images and representations, such as candles, and I would wager a lot of Medieval and Renaissance Art. In a sense it is a look at what other people including myself worship besides religion, and how that worship manifests itself in visible ways.

In the second which is basically a stitching together of elements from various artists and art movements I like, it is a little more nebulous and difficult to pin down. Consistently on my list are artists Jose Parla and Kehinde Wiley. I love Parla's free-flowing abstractions of script and the way he takes elements from the street such as wheat pasted posters, advertisements left behind, and layers onto them washes of paint and scripting. From Wiley I admire his skill in rendering his figures in such a naturalistic fashion, imitating the works of historically lauded dead European/White men and mixes in the decorative elements with very garish flowery sometimes feminine aspects to them. Generally any sort of realism involving the human figure draws my attention, and lately a lot of that has been J.C. Leyendecker and Jack Vettrianno's works. Usually I will find some random photo on a fashion blogging site and apply elements from everything I have listed in this paragraph.

I am not sure which way I will veer in this bountiful problem... though it is not a problem at all. After all, more art is a good thing.

The uncontrollable reflex of making meaning of random events

After three and a half years of working with the Community Arts Sustaining Academics at Hurley Elementary, it was decided that what I was doing with and for the students and what the School Administration would like to do with the students were no longer coalescing in the administration's interest. Having to show evidence that the program coordinators are working with their partners schools, they let me go. Today was my last day at Hurley Elementary, and I was touched by how much people there saw me as a part of their community, and their genuine surprise and heart-rending disappointment that I was going, and that my transition from there was only one day. I told my students the news and many of them responded with a loud and whining "Why?!" followed by a resolute "I'm just not going to come to class anymore." which also had the sting of feeling scorned. After all, this was not the end of school year fare well, but a sudden withdrawal and change in their routine. We took a photo together, and then I explained what we would be doing in class that day, how the class was going to change in a broader sense with the new art teacher, and that I would miss all of them very much.
Both before and after class, I sought out the people who I had worked with in the past three and a half years and gave them a small sealed "Thank you" card personalized with a short thank you for all the ways in which they had welcomed me and made me a part of their community, and how I cherished what they had done.  Some people, including in the administration expressed surprise and a palpable sense of disappointment, as if my departure was an injustice to them on some level. It was very heartwarming what they shared with me in my last work day. At the end of class, each of my students wanted to give me a hug, so I obliged. I organized the materials as neatly as I could in the cramped storage space, grabbed my bag and walked out of the building. Having been notified about my transition from the program, I had already mourned and basically accepted the reality of what was happening. To a certain degree, it paralleled my experiences bidding my farewells to friends, colleagues, and professors when I was deployed to Iraq. They were more distraught than I was at the moment.
On the drive home, listening to my playlist, two songs played consecutively; a paring which begged, and reflexively claimed meaning. Individually, and in any other context you can put any two songs together and assign them a meaning based on the situation. I had paired the song "Disarm" by The Smashing Pumpkins with an eight kilometer ruck march in Basic Training. My best friend had sent me the lyrics in a letter and I had read them prior to the march so fragmented memory of how the song went played in cadence with my footsteps. The song "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service is forever associated with my family and a friend and his son dropping me off at the airport post Easter Sunday before I deployed to Baghdad. Given the context of those sample situations, the lyrics from the songs, such a memory is very strongly imprinted to those melodies. So after the ordeal of saying farewell to my students, and my seemingly sudden departure from the program, the songs "Used" by Sacha Sacket, immediately followed by "Risk of Change" by Holcombe Waller summed up both the mild bitterness from being let go, but also the ideals I would like to further embody in this new calendar year.
I do hope that my kids have been changed for the better, and they remember fondly the time they had spent in my class.