I'm still really enjoying doing some colorful, quick sketches as I adjust to the new world normal. I also turned off the news today and caught up on my favorite writers podcast #AmWriting. It's three friends talking about the self directed creative life (including lots of nuts and bolts advice that transfers over to lots of creatives, not just writers), and it's warm, funny, and super informative. I've learned a ton over the last few years. Last week's episode was on websites, and it made me consider how mine looks on a mobile phone. Fortunately my Weebly platform converts itself to mobile. I love having a site I can control, update, and expand without knowing coding. But I hadn't considered the question of which information rises to the top as my two columns on the main site merge into one. Now I've got that fixed for better information sooner.

In the process, I scanned in my recent sketches. I've been mostly just snapping iphone photos and throwing them up lately, but boy howdy, are they nicer when I take the time to scan them in. So here are the next installments of the Quarantine Journal, and I decided to give it its own page as well. They'll pop up here first, but there will be an in order narrative on the QJ page.

One of my important preparations for staying home a while was to stock up on sketchbooks. I was out of two different kinds of bigger ones, and I also wanted to support The Art Center, a fantastic local art supply store that is central to my life. I’m still really excited about my WAMA exhibition (and very grateful it’s scheduled for two years out with the way the world is going!), but I’m also having trouble focusing on that work. I’ve been working on my first large sized print (18x24”, my biggest ever), and it’s incredibly complex. My brain hurts, and I have been reluctant, in a way that is not at all normal for me, to sit down and carve. Art is usually a haven for me, and I’m remarkably lucky that my daily life is largely intact — I work at home and live with a great dog in a stable, welcoming space. I can still take walks and bike rides in the park and holler at friends from a safe distance. I’m remarkably lucky, but even so I’m struggling to digest the way the world has turned on a dime in the period of a week or two.

So yesterday, after a little work on the block, I decided to pull back and make cheerful art. My sister started the semester in a drawing class, which we’ve had fun talking about over the last few months. I haven’t sketched with waterproof ink in a long time, but I was recommending she try some pen sketches with washes of color. This is how I started in watercolor, but then I got more serious about the paint and minimized my lines to either more subtle fountain pen ink, that melds with the paint, or pencil. I decided it was time to play a little more and do some colorful, cheerful sketches of my daily life during these times.

Urban sketchers, known for sitting out on the sidewalk and doing “reportage drawing” from life, has a new hashtag. #uskathome. Sketchers around the world are shut in their homes and having to find new subjects, drawn from their daily lives. It’s been fascinating to watch these glimpses of quarantine around the world. I should still be able to sketch in the park some, though I’ll definitely be moving further off the trails before settling down. Not everyone is keeping the distance that I feel is safe, and when you’re sitting down with your art supplies spread out, you’re a bit of a sitting duck for what the world sends. I’ve known that for years. It’s usually wonderful to have unexpected conversations, but there are also predatory men who take advantage of the situation. This is a whole different level of threat, so I’ll be careful. But I also want to just document my days and how I’m spending them. Here are the first three drawings in my new journal. They helped. I felt tremendously better going to bed after sketching in the evening.

Boy howdy, y’all. The world changed fast. So I’m hunkering down to make art and am feeling continually grateful for my WAMA show to work towards. It gives me something positive and productive to focus on and it also means that I’m in a hunker down and make art period anyway instead of a cancelling shows period. I’m deeply lucky to be in the haven of a family house with a fantastic dog and a beautiful forest nearby to walk in. There’s enough space there for people to spread out. Watching my friends in the denser cities in Europe I feel very lucky indeed.

I’m also grateful that I’ve spent time over recent months trying to make my home the place I really want it to be. I had my birthday in mind as a deadline. I’ve lived in this house 25 years and have just lived with many inherited, not ideal things. Like the wallpaper in my bedroom. I decided I wanted to change it now so I can enjoy the next 25 years instead of waiting until I have to move. There are a couple of things on the list that I haven’t gotten to yet, but I have painted my bedroom, cleaned various spaces, framed and hung artwork that has been sitting around waiting for me to get to it, and bought a few things that make me really happy, like a stained glass panel for my landing window. My house feels really good to be in now, and I’m grateful to my friends who are wizards at creating warm, welcoming spaces for inspiring me to finally move in this direction.

Yesterday before dinner I sketched my birthday flowers from my dear friend Melissa Bridgman (bridgmanpottery.com). She so kindly left them by my side door, and I love being able to capture them to keep them forever in my sketchbook. Looking back through the years there are other birthday bouquets from her as well. Such kindness.

I’ve been working on my first large block (18x24”) for the new press, and it’s been going incredibly slowly. I’ve also been a little under the weather, so sketching has been sparse lately, but here are a few. They postponed baseball today, so I took to the forest with Mr. Darcy to draw. Always a good option, no matter what is going on, and I needed to clear my head.

A couple of nights ago I got super tired of my own cooking, and I headed to Huey’s. It’s One Week, 100 People on Instagram, and I’m home by myself too much to make any headway, but I did go do a token couple of pages. I got in 12 on this page and another few close up sketches in another book, but I won’t be getting close at all this year.

This last one is older — a couple of weeks ago. It was a gorgeous day, and I took my bike out the green line and had lunch at the park at the edge of town. There’s a bench by a small lake that always has ducks (and occasionally buffalo hanging around behind a fence too...don’t ask), and it’s my favorite long bike ride destination. The flowering trees are going like crazy right now, which always makes me happy.

Y'all!! Huge news! I'm going to have a solo exhibition at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art! Anderson is one of my main art heroes, and his museum is holy ground for me. I've been visiting for years just to drink in his work. I've been lobbying for this since last spring (and the curator Mattie Codling has kindly continued to look at the work I've been sending), and I finally got the ok. I've been longing for a substantive show to work towards again. The best work I do is for a specific place with a theme that resonates, and when I have time to create from scratch for a show. This show will be January to August 2022, so two years from right now. I'm delighted to have time to make my best work for it, and I'm also glad not to have it flash past too quickly in a stressful rush.

Mattie put me tentatively on the schedule at the end of January, but I had to wait for committee approval to be able to announce it. Four days after talking to her, I found the new press. It will greatly expand the size of the prints I'm able to do, and all of this coming together just felt meant to be. You can see below my old print bed with my maximum sized old print sitting in the new press bed, for comparison. I'm thrilled to be able to grow just as I work for this deeply special exhibition.

I’ve finally got a full proof of the Shearwater Diptych hanging in my work room. After several weeks it feels great to see it together, even if I’m still working on cleaning it up and considering a few smaller foreground additions. In the evenings I’ve continued to do some sketches of Mr. Darcy, so here are a couple of recent ones. I’m considering one or two for prints, so watch this space. Sometimes it’s nice to have a smaller print or two in progress to switch to when the big ones get a little overwhelming.

I’ve had quite a week. I’m a member of a letterpress sale group on facebook, basically a worldwide classifieds site for letterpress equipment. Which means that usually when I see something interesting, it’s in Belgium. Or Brazil. Or somewhere enough remote from me to make it impractical.

I was beautifully lucky years ago to stumble into a Line-o-scribe proof press when a friend of mine was upgrading. It’s expanded my range and ability exponentially from what I was willing to do rubbing on the back of blocks with a flat wooden spoon. But the press bed is limited to 14x21”, which means if I want any margin at all, I end up cutting the 18x24” blocks I buy down to at least 12x20” and maybe smaller. I just rededicated myself to prints over the new year after spending more of the last year and a half painting. I’ll always likely move between the two, but I do think my most original voice is in prints. And I’ve been longing to do bigger prints. Just before this press floated across my fb feed, I had started a diptych on the old one, to be able to have a larger image and impact, even if it was in two parts.

Then this beauty showed up. It’s a Reynolds Printasign model 40 with a 22x30” bed, a huge upgrade. And it was in Oklahoma City, just a 7 hour drive. So perfect. It also has a self inking system and a custom table with a foot pedal to release the paper gripper. So I drove over Thursday to get it. I’m feeling ridiculously lucky this week.

There’s going to be another learning curve. My brain is really not skilled at mechanical things, and this has a couple of serious differences from the press I’m used to. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get the inking coverage I really want for my velvety black prints. I may keep hand inking a lot of what I do, but it would be beautiful if I can figure out a way to get that depth without hand inking the plate each time. Repetitive printing is my least favorite part of all of this. I love the designing and carving and tweaking to get the image I want, but once I have it, the rote printing is a chore for me. So fingers crossed.

This press was also made for use with its own type, which rests on rails, so regulation type (.918” for standard North American type) is too short for the inking rollers to even touch. I’ll have to build up the bed to use the type I have. It may be that my old press is better for some of the things I do. But having this size is just amazing, and I’m excited to have it placed in a window with lovely light to work in during the day time. I can’t wait to do a big print for it, though again, I’ll have to go out and find something to lay in the bed and raise the print up to the roller height. That should be easy enough though for a life changing kind of thing.

I played around with it after several really lovely friends helped me move it inside. Here is the first print, a celebration of the press and of this year when all my art ideas seem to be coming beautifully together. You can see that I used the heavy magnets that came with the press to hold the type steady in the bed. They’re not as totally firm as building wood all around it, like a jigsaw, but a lot faster. You can also see that I wasn’t getting a really sold, dark print. This faded look is really cool for some things, but for others I’m going to want something darker.

I was living my best life yesterday, which felt lovely. It was a glorious, warm day in the middle of a rainy winter, and I decided to enjoy it to the full. I worked on the print I’m excited about in the morning (see the bottom photo for a close up — I mostly finished the sky), had lunch, and then went out to enjoy the day. Mr. Darcy and I walked first. I packed my small backpack with sketching gear, so we hung out, painted this glorious curved tree that I walk past daily, and chatted to neighbors as they too got out to bask in the 65 degree weather.

After that I got back on my bike, which has been neglected the last couple of weeks. I did some loops around midtown, enjoying our neighborhoods and looking at the houses, and I stopped at Burke’s Books, Memphis’s 140 year old independent bookstore. Beautifully I happened on a $6 biography of Berthe Morisot. I just ordered a frame my poster from her solo show at the Orsay this past summer, so it was a perfect time to revisit my newest art hero. I looped back through the park for the sheer pleasure of the forest and logged right at 11 miles total. I only learned how to ride a bike this summer, and it has greatly increased my joy. I feel like a kid swooping around. It’s kind of nice to have some pleasures that are delayed to discover along the way.

In the evening I met friends for dinner and a concert by the New Orleans Dirty Dozen Brass Band. So much fun. I’m really grateful for this life I get to live.

I came home from Ocean Springs with three new print ideas in my head. (We’ll see how many look good once they’re actually drawn out on paper.) This was the first I dived into, from my morning quick study looking across from the marina to the Shearwater family complex. I’ve got both blocks drawn and transferred and am in the second (partial) day of carving the left hand one. It’s still going to be a hot minute before I have anything to proof. This is moving pretty slowly, but I’m trying to be really thoughtful and get it right.