Plein Airpril
Painting outside, taking down an art show, and the Legion of Honor
Greetings and happy spring!
My show Habitat is over and what’s left is living at the NE People’s Yoga location. I decided to dive straight into Plein Airpril (hosted by @warriorpainter on Inst*gram) perhaps for fear of losing momentum. Maybe you can relate, but I feel like I always need a project. The challenge is to paint and post on Instagram a plain air painting (painted outside with no reference photo – the subject is what is in front of you) for every day of April.
Here are my favorites so far:
I’ve cheated once or twice by painting from a reference photo but the majority of these were done outside – which is the part of the challenge I love! Especially when I can do it with my partner Cole who also paints.
The part I am not liking is posting every day on Inst*gram. I was worried about this when I started the challenge and my fears were confirmed. I’m soooo sucked in there you guys. This is my cry for help. I am getting out.
For the rest of this month I will continue painting and aim to post the second half here :)
Since my last newsletter I had a solo show, taught a third rendition of my Sketchbook Journey class at Ulna studios, and visited San Francisco for work. Folks asked me how I felt at the opening of my show and to be honest it was really hard to feel grounded – I felt more like a spinning top. My favorite part of the process for this series was the beginning! Coming up with ideas and imagining the possibilities of everything. I went through a period towards the end of the process where I felt disappointed – my spark had dimmed and I was in the pit (if you’re an artist you are familiar with the pit of despair). Lindsay Stripling (
) gave me a pep talk during a session of her Night Class that got me over the finish line. I’m proud of myself for finishing and showing the work. Here is the first piece sold called we’re not as close as we used to be but today I thought of you along with some scans from a notebook I started keeping a year ago when I first started thinking about this work in Lettie Jane’s ( )Deeper Drawing class.
I visited the Legion of Honor in SF for the first time and drew some vessels. It had been a week since the last class of Sketchbook Journey – during this session I introduced a project called the Imagined Vessel where students imagine various shapes of a vessel then paint a grid of them exploring positive and negative space). During my visit to the museum I had this thought which I wanted to share with you here:
Art making, drawing, or any other form of creative expression is a human behavior not just a hobby or skill. I see so many people depriving themselves of this basic human behavior because of fear, guilt, shame, etc. Of course we want what we make to be good but if that is our only objective we are missing the point and missing out.
Thanks so much for reading my newsletter! It’s been a little while so thank you for sticking around.
Tarot card:
I pulled the Nine of Cups this week and I felt very attuned to it’s message (lucky me!) It is the wish card, letting me know that all of my dreams have come true and all I have to do is enjoy this pleasure. Here is Lettie Jane’s Nine of Cups from her Many Queens Tarot deck:
Currently reading:
This Long Thread by Jen Hewitt
Currently listening to:
Handsome Podcast and We’re Here To Help because I need to laugh
Love the tulips 😍