My Blog has moved! Please visit my new website www.rosaphoenix.com

pencil drawing by Rosa Phoenix

I've moved! Please visit me at my new website www.rosaphoenix.com


I'll keep this site up so you can look through the archives, but new good stuff is on my new site!


Hope to see you there.

Rosa Phoenix Art Studio Opening in October 2014

Hello folks,

I'm moving on to do do more great work! 

In 2012, I started teaching art classes, just to try it out. 

I discovered that I have a real gift for teaching, and I love the community that I form with my students. 

What began as an experiment in life has become a full-fledged passion.

As I quickly found myself to be in great demand as an art teacher, that passion turned into a career and a calling.

Now I'm taking the next step, which is opening an art studio of my own where I can teach classes.


Rosa Phoenix Art Studio will open its doors on October 25, 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona with a beginner pencil drawing class for adults. 

I'm offering 20% off the price of the class to celebrate the grand opening. Click here to register.



I also have a new website and new blog. I've had a wonderful experience here on blogger for 5 years! But it's time to move on. I will keep this blog up so anyone can visit the archives.

I do hope you will visit me at my new place!

www.rosaphoenix.com

Future Vision

sketchbook page

pen and ink sketch 

by Rosa Phoenix

"I keep having this vision, where I am walking out into the desert."

This is a page from my sketchbook, one month before I moved to Arizona, in 2011.

At the time, it was vision into the future. This vision is now my reality.

It's interesting to look back at past sketchbooks, and see records of my thoughts, dreams and things that I was seeing at that time in my life.

I Follow My Heart

Heart Fire
photo by Abdulhamid Al Fadhly

Happy Rosa Phoenix Day! 

Today is Valentine's Day as well, a time to celebrate love and romance.

Today is also the one year anniversary of launching my business, Rosa Phoenix Art & Design.

It's also time to celebrate a new year (the lunar new year was on Feb 3 -- I launched my business on the lunar new year 2010). 

It's a good time to take note of a change, and the beginning of a new cycle.

I moved back to my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona.

This was after living for 10 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and prior to that, New York City.

I left Phoenix and my family at age 18, to see the world and live a life of my own.

I quickly adapted to big city life in New York and San Francisco, met lots of people, learned about other cultures, and made great connections everywhere I traveled.

Everywhere I went, I found love . . . in the form of friends, neighbors, romantic partners, and even kind strangers who helped me.

My heart went through its own changes.

It grew with love, it shrank with fear, it broke with sorrow, it strengthened with courage and resolve, it reached out to others when they needed caring, and it even broke others' hearts, through carelessness or cruelty.

My heart has been transformed by all these experiences and interactions with other people. I feel that now it is a stronger and wiser heart, growing and expanding more all the time.

I follow my heart. It constantly leads me to new places that are full of risk and renewal. My heart leads me on my journey as an artist, a twisting and turning path where nothing is known or secure. Yet this is what makes me happy.

My heart also leads me away from my comfortable and familiar life, and many people I love and care about. This makes me sad because I miss them, but I also have faith that my heart is leading me to the place where I need to be.

I trust my heart to guide me.

Now my heart is leading me back home.

I am returning, 18 years after I left, to live with my family again in Phoenix. It definitely feels like a full cycle has been completed, and a new one is starting.

For some time now, I've been having visions of the Arizona desert, its colors and textures and vast open spaces. Arizona is forever a part of me. It called me back, and I responded to the call.

I'm looking forward to the new adventure, whatever is in store for me.

Valentine's Day is a day to celebrate the heart and the people you love. I always follow my heart, and my heart led me back home. Love is here with me, where it has been waiting all along.


What does "follow your heart" mean to you?