246 Days Later...

I'm on a roll, folks, making and posting art every day (on Facebook and Instagram, go see for yourself). Though I started on January first without any clear plan, at this point I intend to keep it up, at least until the end of the year.

It feels good to apply myself to this creative task—to explore color and texture and composition, and to use up my hoard of art supplies (while sticking to a resolution to—for now anyway—avoid buying anything new).

But to keep this up day after day and still find the process engaging, I need to be digging into something meaningful. There has to be personal inquiry. I need to be strengthening my voice, sharing my vision, honing in on something I want to say—about life, about nature, about beauty, about engagement in the world.

Partway into this project, I stumbled into making fashion collages while exploring my thoughts and feelings about female bodies, female beauty, and female strength. I still plan to do more in that vein.

In the meantime, I'm making drawings with Sharpie markers, landscapes that range from pure abstraction to almost-realism. I can feel a part of my mind struggling as I make these, in the same way a writer might struggle for the right word to signify meaning.

There's something I'm trying to articulate in these new drawings, something about the magic of the natural world, about the vibrancy and potential in every living thing, every living moment. Every life.

I want to be entirely present in every moment. And I want you with me.

That's all I've figured out so far.

Celebrating Women

My Daily Art collection has become a paper fashion show — here's today's addition.
Daily updates on my Facebook album and Instagram feed.

In childhood I got the message that the hair thickening on my brothers' legs was fine, while mine was disgusting, an embarrassment, something I needed to make sure no one saw. Shaving, putting on makeup, wearing "dressy" (aka uncomfortable) shoes and constrictive clothing, was not a pleasure for me, but a punishment, an insidious, subtle message that I was not okay as is.

But at the same time, I read the beauty magazines and longed to feel pretty, to feel worthy of all of the pretty things...

Whether it shows on us or not, we women feel pressure every day over our appearance, a sense that we need to be attractive in order to be worthy of attention. Some women go to great effort to meet this challenge, but for me, this effort feels humiliating. I hate for it to show that I am in any way "trying" to look good.

I remember coming downstairs one morning at about 14 years old in the slightly tight t-shirt I'd slept in. My father stared and smiled at me like I was something delicious to eat. I felt good and bad in that moment—aware of the power of my developing body to attract male attention, glad that my father was smiling at me, but also uneasy. Instead of getting the loving and respectful attention I so desperately wanted from him, I felt like as if I might be devoured.

I admire women who are unapologetically fierce while conforming to these difficult standards— the hair and makeup and shoes and manicures etc. I admire women who don't feel like they're conforming but do all these things in the name of personal expression, or in celebration of their inherent beauty—regardless of age or body size or curves or lack thereof. I also admire women who, like me, have hair in their armpits and dirt under their nails and holes in their jeans and not a single high heel in their closet. AND I admire women who struggle with the pressure, who try things and try other things and sometimes give up trying altogether, eat too much (or too little), have closets full of clothes they never touch or can't bear to shop. We're all up against brutal, irrational pressure. I celebrate all of us!

Blast Off

I'm on fire with this new "Snapsketch" series (as I'm now calling it)—making drawings with the Snapchat's unsophisticated, strictly limited tool for drawing and writing over photographs with one finger on a smartphone screen.

With just a few colors and a single font (writ huge or tiny and without many options as to placement) my creativity is truly challenged. (if I need black or white in the drawing, for instance, I must find them in the underlying photo.) Mostly I choose blank or close-to blank backgrounds, at least so far.

My favorite limitations with this tool is time - if I start a drawing, I have to finish it promptly or else Snapchat discards it. So I make a drawing in a single sitting, place a bit of not-too-premeditated text over it, and send it out into the world.

I'm archiving these, for now anyway, in an album on Facebook.

Work in Progress

Unfinished painting

That title refers to this painting, my battle with cancer (more about that here), my book proposal (I'm working on a cookbook - more about that here), and many many other things.

Though of course I eagerly anticipate wrapping up many of these ongoing projects, there are many more waiting in the wings. I do not doubt that when I die, I will leave many an open loop.

I would have it no other way.

Nostalgia

The artwork in this post is all on 8.5 x 11" paper in some combination of ink, watercolor, and oil pastel. Shipping is included in the listed prices.



SOLD


When I was five years old, I knew I wanted to be two things when I grew up: an artist and a writer. Though these desires have never flagged, at times my confidence has. Therefore, my life has occasionally strayed — quite unhappily — far from the mark.

About ten years ago, I was working construction by day and dabbling in (but mostly feeling discouraged about) my writing and art at night and on the weekends. Perhaps it was the day that I learned to run the jackhammer that things began to change.

Running a jackhammer was a secret dream since childhood. It seemed entirely outside of my grasp. After all, I only saw jackhammers on construction sites in the hands of muscle-bound men in hardhats. Construction sites, not to mention hardhats, seemed completely inaccessible. Great big biceps seemed, well, not exactly desirable. But the day I ran the jackhammer I learned that not everything that looks hard is hard.

Perhaps it was a true epiphany. Perhaps my brain had just been jostled out of complacency by a loud, violently vibrating machine, but very soon thereafter it hit me: I was already both an artist and a writer. And not only that, but: I can run a jackhammer! It didn't matter if I believed in myself. It didn't matter if I was "successful" in any sense of the word. I am free to dedicate as much energy and resource as I can muster to my cause: the full realization of me.

These drawings/paintings of grapes come from that time. In fact, they were the first thing I did after realizing that I wanted to keep my art and writing as the central creative pursuits of my life. I gave a bowl of grapes to myself as an assignment, a drawing challenge, a creative inspiration, and finally, after several nights' work, a snack.

I hope you, dear readers, invest in yourselves similarly.





$125

$125

SOLD




SOLD






$125

$125

$125

$125

$125

Airbag

48" x 36" oil on canvas
email for more information

Have I told you that I'm a writer? I'm starting to wear that label with a bit more confidence, now that one of my essays is due to be published in a book. (More on that as the release date approaches, not for a while yet.) In the meantime, I'm working on a book proposal of my own, have been, in fits and starts, for years. I'm in the grueling last big uphill push before the homestretch now. Though the project weighs heavily on my mind, and I'm anxious to have it done, it's all I can do lately to strap myself into a chair and work on it for even ten minutes at a time.

Maybe I'm afraid that if I look too closely, I'll decide the whole thing is junk, or that I don't want to write the book after all, or that I can't possibly do it because I'm not nearly smart, talented, dedicated, or knowledgeable enough to pull it off. I can't put my finger on the source of this anxiety, except to say: It's one of those things in life that simply feels dangerous—like a car speeding toward an imagined impact—even when it's not.

I traded phone time today. For forty minutes I listened and supported while L. talked through some things. For the next forty, she did the same for me, calmly and quietly witnessing while I typed (and griped) and made more progress on my proposal than I have in weeks. Just goes to show you: Sometimes all you need is an airbag.

I'm starting to believe I'm actually going to complete this thing, which gets me excited to sniff out the next creative project to engage myself in. One that comes to mind: finding a show for my big (bigger, anyway — see above) oil paintings. They're beginning to stack up.