Join me as I make a small watercolor. I start with a drawing of geometric shapes, then I make a watercolor loosely inspired by a landscape. I’ll share my thought process and inspiration with you along the way. I hope you’ll enjoy this meditative process.
See a year’s worth of little watercolor squares I made here.
If you want to learn more about watercolor, I offer an online watercolor course, and you can find it here.
I did something I haven’t done in a while this week. I made a little watercolor square and shot a video of it, showing the process from start to finish. If you’ve been following my work for some time, you might be familiar with my project of making little watercolors every day for a year back in 2016. Making small watercolors has always been a meditative practice for me, so doing this felt like coming home. With all the craziness happening in the world, I felt like sharing this process as a little gift I could give others. I hope it brings you some peace.
If you want to learn more about watercolor, I offer an online watercolor course, and you can find it here.
For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with making watercolor maps of my runs, walks, and bike rides. I keep track of these activities using a GPS, upload the data to Strava (a sort of social network for athletes), and then use the Strava-generated map as the reference for these drawings.
When I started making these, I was including a lot of the data, but after a while I realized that the map part was the most interesting. So I’ve focused on making these smaller – more minimal – drawings since then.
Below you can see the drawings in their current incarnation (the six drawings on the top left) and in their previous forms. The current drawings are 5×7 inches and are watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, ink, and acrylic.
I turned 45 last Saturday and spent the week with my family at Oak Island, NC. Each day I indulged in multiple trips to the beach to run or walk or swim or just jump over waves. I read a lot and caught some of Roland-Garros. It was pretty great!
In the studio I’ve been working on a painting commission of skiers and I think it’s done. I’m starting an intimidating weaving project next, and I’ll share when things are under way and I have images to show.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out my show at the Sawtooth School, it’s up until July 12th. You’ll find drawings, collages, textiles, installation, and video on themes of changing ecology.
Since I was in graduate school over 20 years ago and discovered cycling, I’ve tried to reconcile my training as an athlete and my practice as an artist. I think that the energy required to do both comes from a similar place and I’ve tried to figure out how to make riding or running or walking my actual artistic practice with varying degrees of success. There is precedent for this – the English artist Hamish Fulton makes the act of walking the central part of his artistic practice. Through his work he elegantly addresses familiarizing oneself with nature as a way to respect it, and that in turn as a way to address climate change. The sort of artifacts that he makes post walk are also tied to the land he travels through their size, form, and materials, but these things he makes are secondary to the walks, more of a way to share the walks with others in a gallery setting.
I always come back to wanting to make things. Making things is how I understand the world around me and how I express my thoughts in the way that is most intuitive, not in a linear way, but in a way that is more meandering. And while I know that riding bikes, running, and walking inspire my work, making those the actual work, hasn’t felt like enough. It hasn’t satisfied the urge to make things.
When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina a few weeks ago, less than 100 miles away, and people’s entire lives were swept away and the actual topography of the mountains violently changed in a moment, everything suddenly seemed very ephemeral. Some of the most destructive aspects of climate change were here.
Climate change is something I’ve wanted to address more directly in my work for a long time, but I think all of the attempts I’ve made would be upsetting for a casual gallery goer, and so they’ve never seen the light of day. It’s important to me that my work at the very least not be depressing for those who experience it, so none of my attempts at addressing the ecological crisis have ever hit the mark for me.
The project I’ve been working on using natural dyes to color handkerchiefs for next spring, coupled with another project I’m expanding on (the boulders from my spring exhibit at The Art Gallery at Congdon Yards, which you can see here at approximately 1 minute into this video tour of the show), together start to address nature and ecological issues through textiles. The hankies suspended in the air are each dyed using natural plant and insect derived dyes that have been used throughout history. The boulders on the ground are made by compressing and tightly binding cast off textiles commercially dyed. As you probably know, the fashion industry pollutes through its processing and dyeing of fabrics and uses astonishing amounts of water. It also creates literal mountains of garbage. These projects will be coupled with other sculpture, video, and sound, that I hope can effectively address climate change while keeping true to my values as an artist. I still believe in beauty and dreaming and poetry.
Last weekend on a forest walk with my husband and our son, I noticed all of the acorns on our path. Acorns, along with oak leaves and bark, can be used to make dyes varying in color from yellow, tan, green, brown, and even violet. The three of us collected pieces from the ground, and later that day, my son and I prepared them for dyeing fabric. He used a hammer to smash the acorns as I whittled away the bark, and we put each collection in a jar with water. They’ll soak for a week or so before I can extract the dye. As for the leaves, I poured boiling water on them, left them to sit overnight in a pot, and simmered them in the morning with hankies. After a day, the hankies were various shades of creamy yellow and orange.
While I still am not clear on how to make a walk my artistic practice (maybe I simply need to declare that it is?), the act of walking and collecting plant matter to generate color for my work is deeply satisfying. I’m enjoying all the research on which plants to use for lasting color, how to extract the color, and tangentially all the social history around textiles and natural dyes, which ties into culture and economy.
I’m curious to see where these projects take me.
I’m back from a mind blowing 2 weeks at Penland School of Craft learning to work glass with Jessica Jane Julius and Erica Rosenfeld. Our workshop culminated in an edible installation and performance in the hot shop. I had never worked with glass before, and have a whole new appreciation for how complex the medium is. The experience also opened up my eyes to what performance and installation could be. I came home full of ideas and stoked to make new work!
I’m not sure how this will play out in my work yet. I realized while I was there that I was particularly interested in the optical qualities of glass, like making lenses and prisms for example. I’ve played with distortion and blurring of images both in my painting and video work, and I’m curious about how using a glass element could alter something seen through it.
I also wanted to make simple well balanced vessels while I was there, and learned how challenging it is to make elegant shapes with glass. You have to work quickly while it’s hot, with the correct amount of force, and a surprisingly light subtle touch. And it’s the most humbling of materials. It can be impossible to save pieces when things go wrong, and failure is catastrophic. Pieces often deformed beyond repair and/or shattered.
I enjoyed cold working glass – the work you do using shop tools to work the glass after it’s been annealed. The tools felt familiar – they are similar to wood shop tools. The tools use diamond grit to cut and grind, and aren’t as sharp or abrasive as wood tools. Water is used throughout the cold working process to keep the glass cool and to rinse off the silica as it is ground or cut off. It was satisfying to properly finish my pieces or in some cases to alter them completely using these tools.
I loved working in the hot shop. With four furnaces and all sorts of torches constantly running, it was the hottest environment I’ve ever worked in – over 100F during the day – and the work is very physical. The pipes and rods used to gather and heat the glass are long and heavy, and you have to keep rotating them as you work. Working in teams was another highlight – we all depended on each other to make work.
This month I’ve been painting a group of portraits of my family. I started with myself, then my husband, and finally our son. It’s been an interesting practice to notice how the experience of painting each one of us changes. For my portrait and my husband’s I worked from life: looking into a mirror for mine and asking my partner to pose for his. One of the challenges of working from life is needing to translate a three-dimensional thing into the two dimensions of a painting.
For my son’s portrait, rather than asking him to pose for hours, I opted to work from a photo instead. While it’s easier – in a way – to work from a photo because the camera does the work of flattening life’s three dimensions into two, it’s also easy to become obsessive about EVERY SINGLE DETAIL. This isn’t necessarily a good thing when painting. Part of painting is learning to discern which details to include and how much to leave out. The longer we stare at our subject, the more we discover. And if we include every little thing, the result will surprisingly look less realistic because of how our eyes and brains perceive what we see in real life. For example, if I paint an area in shadow with the same degree of detail and contrast as a part in the light, something will seem off when we look at the painting. For the spatial effect to work, we actually have to lessen the contrast and level of detail in the shadows.
Another part of what makes painting so interesting and complicated is the making of decisions of how to portray something or someone in a way that reveals an aspect of them and/or of the artist. It is an interesting challenge to make a realistic image that still looks like a painting rather than trying to make it look like a photo, which is more of an exercise in copying.
There’s also something magical about seeing an image in a painting, and then as you step closer to the work, gradually realizing that the image is just a collection of brush marks. (Have I mentioned that I often get into trouble in museums when I get a little too close to paintings?)
Here’s a collection of images showing the process of making the portrait of my son, from start to finish:
This week I made a portrait of my husband Tim. Since I made a self-portrait a couple weeks ago, I decided to make a trio of portraits that include our son too. Below are images of the process of day 1 and day 2. I’m really enjoying painting these at this scale. It was also fun to recreate one of my paintings in the background of this one.
Also this week I came across this photo of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera watching a solar eclipse with friends in 1932.
And I learned about about “Andrea Y. Motley Crabtree—the first woman to pass the rigorous U.S. Army test for deep sea diving, a highly specialized aspect of military service,” when I saw this portrait of her at the Met museum.
I think making self portraits is a good practice as an artist. It serves as a benchmark to gauge skill and changing concerns in technique and color. Rembrandt famously made 100 self portraits (that we know of), and it’s interesting to notice the changes in techniques and age in each one.
The last couple days I painted a self portrait, and I think it’s finished. It’s oil on wood and measures 12×12 inches.
In the next few weeks as classes wind down this semester, I’m reintroducing coaching for artists. This will be in a new format, and you’ll be able to easily book coaching calls here. If you know an artist who’s feeling creatively stuck or needs some art-related guidance, can you let them know?
