bits and bobs

notes from the in-between

I’m writing to you from my back deck, on the first day that it’s warm enough to comfortably sit outside. I’m thinking about *~liminality~*, a fancy artsy word for the in-between. There’s a patch of snow still retreating from the yard, and nothing is green yet. It’s been a long pre-spring. In my work, I’m between projects and feeling not quite where I want to be, as an artist or as an illustrator. With illustration, I’m starting to understand what directions I need to take with my portfolio, as well as how to pitch to potential clients to find commercial work, but a lot of that is still far on the horizon. With painting, I have a vision for what I want my work to look like, but I haven’t grasped my materials and compositions enough yet to take the pieces to the next level.  

The truth is that the day where we have these things all figured out and under control never comes. (A book that helped me accept and maybe even celebrate this is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks). It’s my lifelong work to accept that like the seasons, I myself am a work in progress. We contain multitudes: our lives are beautiful and ugly and funny and sad all at once. Here’s what I’m up to in the messy middle:

• I have been cutting up and rearranging a bunch of photos I’ve taken along the roadside of Highway 16 on recent drives between Prince George and Smithers. This stretch of highway has become quite personally significant in my adult life, and I think I’ll have things to say about it for years. I’m hoping to make a new series about this region with a kind of “road trip” theme; so far I know I want the pieces to include billboards, gas stations, animals, and the weird wonkiness of folk art.

  

  Cut photo scraps and the beginnings of some thumbnail sketches for paintings. The book of poems is Soft Geography by Gillian Wigmore, a local writer who examines small northern places in a way that parallels my work.

  It will be a big project, and I have big ambitions for this work, but I don't even fully know what it is yet, and that’s hard. Getting started and finding the compositions has been hard. One way I like to help myself is to cut out a small paper frame (what the legendary art teacher Corita Kent called a “finder”), and use it to look at details in my photographs, zooming in on areas that would make interesting components in a painting:

  

  Below is a detail from a painting I’ve started. Early this spring I drove by a huge flock of swans on a partly frozen lake somewhere between Houston and Smithers:

  

  If any of you have big, long-term projects on the go, or you’ve taken them on in the past (anything from developing your art portfolio to writing a novel, or creating a garden of edible native plants), I’d love to hear from you. How have you stayed the course when the end goal feels very far away? What has helped you jump in? How do you stay on track?

• Local folks have really gravitated to the illustrated map of Prince George I made a couple years ago. I love maps both literal and metaphorical, so I’m working on some more map work to add to my portfolio. I’ve sketched out some icons and images from Smithers for another local map, and I’ve painted some icons of things I remember from springtime in Kyoto, for a potential travel map of Japan:

• I started knitting again for fun, and recently I’ve been chipping away at the Pressed Flowers Cowl pattern. I chose a variegated cherry-pink yarn to remind me of my spring trip to Japan from years back, which I wrote about last month and can’t seem to stop thinking about. Knitting lets me spend time with my memories - and eventually I get to wear them.

• When I’m stuck, I like to paint everyday things (as per my first newsletter), and I made some quick gouache studies of a favourite teapot (a vintage 1960s Norwegian piece gifted to me by my mom) with some spring blooms and patterns. I’m working on flattening some elements and not worrying so much about getting things “correct.”

• I took a workshop about drawing bodies using yourself as a reference, with my teacher Lindsay Stripling. Whenever I take one of Lindsay’s classes I always learn not only a new technique, but a whole different way of looking at myself or my world. We practiced exaggerating forms while keeping some suggestions of reality. We got vulnerable by looking closely at parts of ourselves we might not love, and tried drawing in a way that celebrates those things. Here is the drawing I made in class of myself zipping up a hoodie. I wanted to highlight the way my fingers gripped the zipper, and the underside view of my double chin:

  

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Assorted nice things:

• For Northern BC folks: I have a few new paintings up at the Robert Frederick Gallery at UNBC as part of the First-Ever Annual Laid-Back Art Show, which runs until May 9th. My pieces are about leisure during environmental disasters, and whether it’s possible to be “laid-back” in dark times:

  

  Also for northern BC folks: Catherine Blackburn’s show New Age Warriors at Two Rivers Gallery is not to be missed! I went to her artist talk and it reminded me that art can be so many things, sometimes all at once: photography, fashion, craft, a social project, a connection to family and personal history, an imagination of a better future. I loved this stunning photograph of the artist’s sister with a medallion that says KAA for Kick Ass Auntie:

Catherine Blackburn, The Churchill Challenger, 2018, Inkjet on dibond , 4 x 5’

• My friend Blair (of previously recommended Velvet Couch fame) wrote a great piece in Maisonneuve on satirical politics and her family’s connection to the Rhinoceros Party. 

• Good jams: new albums from boygenius, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Feist are on rotation in my studio. (And my spring playlist still bops if you need more tunes!)

• A seasonally appropriate and totally delightful illustration by Monika Forsberg:

Ducks of Hampstead Heath (Dog’s Delight) by Monika Forsberg

All the best to you as spring unfolds. Keep looking for the birds! Remember, Emily Dickinson told us that “hope is the thing with feathers.”