One day in mid-November of last year, it all became clear. Clear why Georgia O'Keefe spent so much time in New Mexico. Clear why she, like so many other artists, were and are drawn to the desert.  Clear why paintings born of coastal southern California are not the same as those of the Basin and Range.  Clear why artists travel. Clear why they are attuned to the seasons.  Oh. I said to myself, that November day.  Oh. And also oh no. 

What happened was that the sun disappeared. Poof.  Gone.  Not to return really at all until... well... maybe next week?  Some of the things they say about the Pacific Northwest are true (at least on the western flank of the Cascade range).  One of these is that, for a great number of months per year, it is raining. And when it is not raining, it is cloudy.  One day, poof goes the sun.  Poof.  Goodbye. See you in seven months.

(At the end of the Season of Darkness, the citizens emerge from their caves blinking and bleary-eyed.  It takes a week or two for one's eyes to adjust again to the sunlight.  Out running one day in late spring, I really did find myself thinking, "what's that?" when I saw a bright orb break through the clouds.  I had forgotten.  This is not an exaggeration.) 

When the Season of Darkness hit, I had been drawing tomatoes and their kin in direct sunlight for my Market Season calendar project. And then, quite suddenly, I could not.  My light source was gone.  And there was naught to be done but wait.  I could not up and go to a place with winter sun.  I could not bring the sun back.  And there was also this conundrum: if the sun's light is gone when the quinces are available to draw, you cannot draw actual qunices - sitting-on-the table-in-front-of-you-qunices - in sunlight.  It is not possible.  So, what to do with all the drawings of winter fruits and veggies I had been planning?  (I do not, as yet, have a ready answer, and thus I have no Market Season calendar to offer you. I will one day, but it will require a new approach.)  
   
So yes.  The light.  It matters.   It is a precious thing, to be cherished.  It quite literally shapes place.  Forms show their shapes because of the light, interacting with atmosphere -- with Oregon mist and rain, like a veil, or cutting through the clear New Mexican air to cast sharp shadows on mesa tops.  Time shows its progress because of the sun's light, interacting with form. Form the size of mountains.  Form the size of mint in a jar.  Form the size of a tiny ant's feet.

I knew this, and have lived in this particular place long enough to know that precious sun light would go away for a spell, and with it my direct-sun art season.  But I did not, until making the loop through this first complete seasonal cycle of art-making, really take it all in: The summer lesson that still-life is not still. The winter lesson of the Season of Darkness.

And then there was the lesson of the tree, may she rest in peace.  A beautiful bay laurel, 36 years old plus or minus, healthy as a horse, with a trunk two-and-a-half feet across. I am told she started her life as a wee volunteer along the fence line.  Well, back in September, the power company decided she was a problem. Never mind that she had weathered the previous winter's historic ice storm with cool aplomb when scores of other trees in town were chewed up by it.  Never mind that she had not caused the power lines a problem in all those 36 years.  

Never mind that she wrapped around my second floor dining-studio, making it like living in a tree house.  For eight years I ate breakfast eye to eye with the squirrels and the birds, and reveled in the golden light on the leaves in the morning and evening.  Never mind all that.  It was decided she had to go. And with her passing, the color and intensity of the light in my studio were changed immediately and forever.  My communion with the ecosystem of the tree -- its bird-citizenry shifting with the seasons, its blossoms and seed pods, its squirrel nests, its light and its shade -- was gone.  And I have not really recovered from the loss.  (The photos are of the light in the studio before the tree was taken.) 

Yes, place matters: place as small as a tree canopy or as big as New Mexico.  It matters to art, and to the human spirit.  It's ingredients, and the particular place-recipes that make each one unique (even in this internet-connected, jet-traveling world) matter.  It matters that the light and space are different in New Mexico than in Oregon.  It matters that the they are different inside the canopy of a bay-laurel tree than next to a bare power pole.  

And place matters to me because the things that shape places are my subject-matter and my inspiration, and my solace.  So, in some ways, it was for me a year with a rough set of lessons. But it also showed me the world through a wonderful new set of spectacles. Spectacles of color and light and form, and air and atmosphere and every-day beauty.  It gave me permission to go and see the world through these spectacles. And make art there.  And see how it shapes what I make.  And see how the making shapes how I see.

So I will soon take my first adventure in these new spectacles.  I will set off in a couple of days for the Atlantic coast, where I will be drawing and painting and taking a series of workshops. Where?  I will keep the mystery alive for now... I wonder what the light is like there.  And if there are any bay-laurel trees.  

 Well Hello!

It has certainly been a while since I've updated y'all about what is going on! That is because I have been busy with many delightful things.  I aim to fill you in on some of these in the next week or so.  

​So!  Most recent fun first!  The cheerful cyclist at top right is my old boss at PIVOT Architecture here in Eugene, OR.  She is retiring, and I was commissioned to draw some mural-sized ephemeral art as party decorations for the bash the firm threw for her this past Monday. Check out PIVOT's twitter feed, which has a few photos of me with firm principal Harriet Cherry, the guest of honor. She is, as you might guess, a bicycle enthusiast, as well as a good sport!  (And yes, I know.  Maybe it's not the best idea to drink your wine while you ride -- consider it a metaphor for a happy future.)

I used to do this sort of thing for PIVOT when I worked there... like these African animals that helped celebrate the opening of the company's new offices a few years back.  It is great fun to draw at this scale, which is mostly taller than me.   I get to stand on ladders and stuff!

So!  If you need some party decorations, I am happy to help.  If you do not have giant white boards, I can also work on large sheets of paper, (scroll down to the king and queen), which have the advantage of being something you can keep around.

It's sort of amazing to think about what it's like to be a new baby.  Imagine taking your first breath of air.  Feeling the wind for the first time.  Your first trip to the beach.  Learning how to use your arms and legs; being surprised to find that if you want, they can put you in motion (first lessons in physics, as one new mama I know describes it).  It stands to reason that folks like to create a little something to commemorate these teeny new people's arrival in the world.  I've had the good fortune to be asked to mark the coming of two new babies recently.  

The first was for a baby shower -- a guessing game about when the baby would come.  Each of the banners hanging in the forest-world I dreamt up has a date, with space below for the guests to write in their names.  So it's a little fun for the party, a record of who was there, and a little art to frame for the baby's wall (it was designed to go with the colors of the baby's room).

The second project is a series of three cards commissioned as thank-you notes by another new baby's parents.  Here's a photo of the first sketches, which I'll refine for the final artwork.  This baby was born just after the firefly season started this year, so we used that as the theme.  They will also be available in my on-line shop as individual cards and card sets.  They will be blank inside, so you'll be able to use them for all sorts of commemorations, or just to send a snail-mail hello to your dear friend. 

The sunlight is inconstant.  The clouds come and go.  The breeze moves the leaves of the tree outside the window.  The angle of the sun above the horizon shifts as the earth spins ever farther past high summer.  That distant fireball wanders southward, then west, as the morning turns to afternoon, and the afternoon fades into evening. Between the first sketched lines at quarter-past-nine and my morning snack at half-past ten, the shadows have already transformed the tomatoes.  The color is different, the whole scene less sharp, more mellow, more muted.  Still life is not still.  

One of the unexpected and beautiful lessons of my first few weeks learning to be a working artist is that nature is not inclined to accommodate the punch-card and the office clock; it prefers that you time your work days with the sun and the clouds, and the life-cycles of the plants.  The basil shifts color from deep green to bright-green-yellow over the course of a week of drawing. Tomatoes are perishable - nature to the rescue as you dither about which of the splendid array of shapes, colors, patterns, and sizes you've brought home from your farmers marketing to draw.  (Eating is a rather enjoyable method of editing, it seems...)  So you must, standing in the magical swirl of forces far bigger than yourself - forces that will not pause for you to draw their picture - take up your pencil and your artist's license, and represent only some small kernel of the truth of the world.  How humbling, and how freeing.

One of my first products will be a calendar called Market Season, which will share a year of my adventures at our wonderful local farmers market, plus a little about my strategies for making delicious food in that is simple, healthy, and manageable in the busyness of everyday life.  I have settled on the basic design, and am now playing with format, text, and drawing technique.  I am experimenting with loose drawings that use a combination of graphite and colored pencil.  You can see one of these little tests in the picture above right; the one below it is a sketch of the calendar cover, featuring some lovely leeks on my wooden cutting board.