Looking for Direction, Inspiration, and Time

Since my last post about wanting more time to work on art, and wanting more community, some things seem to be getting momentum. Kind of.

First, the art. While I'd rather be painting/drawing/taking over the world, I've been putting my creative energy in creating random designs and illustrations for Threadless.com. If you're not familiar, Threadless.com is a sort of online retailer for clothing (shirts, hoodies) and accessories. Their stuff is pretty hip and there are tons of shirts I would love to own, pretending that I am still a care free 24 year old college minister and not a 28 year old who works in a cubicle and wears business-casual clothing 32 hrs a week (for what it's worth, it pays the bills and for another 8 hours, I can wear jeans on Fridays).

Really, though, my job is a blessing and provided by God at a time where we thought we were going to go homeless.

Anyway.

So Threadless.com regularly runs contests for artists to create designs for shirts, and win money if the shirts get printed. It's a pretty sweet system - if your shirt gets picked. Although none of the designs I've submitted have been picked (that I'm aware of) and have received mediocre scoring, it's been a fun process to get some kind of creative juices flowing. Some samples are below.

  

What's interesting about this process, and wanting to get more involved in my painting/drawing (I took a break while it was blazing hot), is that it really underscores the many different variations of art and styles that I have. I have these, which are more illustrative and graphic in nature (back to the kind of things I used to do all the time in highschool & college). I have other things like this that I classify as Just For Fun - the things I'll sell at a craft show or just do it for kicks. I tried explaining this to a gallery owner who I'm friends with, and in whose gallery I've shown some work in the past, and she just kind of laughed and gave me this look like I was a little off my rocker. I also make costume jewelry as a hobby.

And then I make paintings like these:

 

 This kind of work I consider my "serious" work, which doesn't imply I don't have fun making them (although sometimes that is true when I can't get it right), but this work goes more into having legitimate meaning that I hope the viewer will experience. I want these to be contemplated, thought over, and so on.

What I'm wondering is if this puts me in a sort of dilemma. Not a crisis or anything like that, I'm not freaking out about it, but the question arises as to what I should focus my time on and IF I should be worried about that kind of thing anyway. Any other artists run into this multiple-personality-style disorder in their work?