My full second day started in the tire store getting a tire fixed. They have nicer views there from the tire store than in Memphis. We went on to the coast from there. It was stunning. It looked like the California impressionist paintings I've seen with rocky outcroppings and pine trees seen from directly above.

It was cold out painting after a while, and I probably was worn out and should have stopped before that last little one, but I was so entranced by the scenery I couldn't stop myself.

We stopped for the sunset on the way back inland. Mount Baker, white with snow, turned pink in the evening light.

The Tennessee Shakespeare Company is putting on Much Ado About Nothing this week, which is one of my favorite plays, and it is being done by a stellar cast. I got excited and went out to sketch at a couple of the rehearsals (my dad is really involved in the company as his retirement project, so they made me nicely welcome). These are largely quick sketches because actors move around a lot more than the musicians I usually draw. But I had such fun doing it. And everyone was so kind about my being there. I started in pencil and switched over quickly to fountain pen.

During the Saturday night performance I mostly sat back and just drank it in, but I did do a couple of pages of sketches, just because it's what I tend to do. I hope anyone in Memphis will go see this. They did a brilliant job of making this play fresh and all their own. I loved it.

This weekend! You're invited! Bring friends if you like.

I've been busy with shows and making very little art this week, but I still have a lot of new stuff from this fall for the show, as does Melissa, who is always trying new things. I love her new "Onward" plates, to go with my small letterpress banners.

I'm doing a lot of getting-ready-for-shows work, but I managed to take a little time and work on my Will you?/Won't you? signpost self portrait. It's almost finished.

I also printed the invitations for the upcoming studio sale today on my treadle operated Chandler and Price. It's always great fun to run the big press.

Plus I had a deadline for the Memphis Daily News today for my monthly sketch feature, so I headed down to the Woodruff-Fontaine House to sketch it all decked out for Christmas. They're having an open house this Friday evening, so it seemed like a good moment to feature them.

Just for my own satisfaction a few weeks ago, I took some leftover strips of paper and made some signs with my vintage wood type. This was the first one, needed for me that week on a couple of counts.

The response on Facebook was strong, and I'm going to be in the Tsunami holiday market this Sunday, so I got some more paper cut and decided to make a stack of different ones. It's fun to have a few lower priced items to sell, so going to have these as a grab and go, as is (not packaged, which takes so much longer) for $10 each.

In the midst of the worst of the park heartbreak, my lovely friend Beth Rowlett sent me a letter (hanging now in my workspace) that said, "dance more!" since she knows that is my happiness. I decided others might also want this lovely reminder. And then my sister Erin and I saw a handpainted sign in Binghampton driving home together from dancing that said "Kindness is free." It was perfect, so I did it too.

Finally, I've been seeing "Memphis as fuck" tee shirts around town and really wanting one despite being unsure if I could actually bring myself to wear one in public. So a studio sign may be just right for me. And it seemed like the right one to really play with my fonts on.

I'm still scrambling around with my show a bit, since the opening is tomorrow night (Playhouse on the Square in Memphis, 5-6:30pm), but I did manage a bit of sketching. The weather is fixing to change, so I took yesterday afternoon to go hang out in the forest with my sketchbook and drink in the last of the gorgeous weather. It's good to have the flexibility to do that and reorder my priorities as bit as the weather calls to me. And it was fruitful. I might try an oil from this first one. We'll see.

Then tonight I went to Dixon to see Wayne Edge's new show and hear some of my favorite jazz guys play at the reception. I couldn't resist sketching them too.

I'm on my third self portrait in what I've come to think of as my Hopper series. It's funny, because the first of these sprang out of my time at the Musee d'Orsay looking at Odilon Redon, but I guess I just don't have it in me to go quite that far out. I do hope I'm capturing some of the sense of mystery and narrative that draws me into his paintings. Pure landscape (and TREES) will always draw me in, but I am enjoying working more figuratively the last few weeks. Story telling is a powerful thing. But I definitely seem to be in a Hopper place of people alone in spaces, caught at odd moments of their lives.

Self portraits can feel like the most self indulgent art form ("Here's another painting of ME!"), but one friend while I was still in Paris responded to my first one (my small form against a big window and bigger sky) by saying she felt exactly that way herself and that my painting gave voice to her feeling. That's what I hope for in this series. We all feel small in this large, crazy, heartbreaking, magical world at some point or another, and by expressing that, I hope to somehow invite people in to that place with me so that none of us feels as alone with it. Sometimes all we need to know is that other people have that same experience. But I also have the buttresses of art, music, and dog to keep me company in those spaces. This piece is also a celebration of the space I have to make my art, and the quiet that is necessary for it.

I got a lovely response from a fellow creative across facebook last night. Jude Dippold is a poet and photographer whose work brings me daily beauty in my feed. He saw this and wrote, "The sense of a life alone is profound with the way you placed yourself in the deepest space of that room; yet the banjo and your dog give both meaning and existential dignity." That understanding and sense of fellowship is what I most hope for with the self portrait series and whatever else might grow out of this work.

Here are several of the stages of the self portrait as I worked on it across two fullish days.

publicly invited Mr. Darcy in a facebook post to come in for the interview as well. He's got three rescues of his own and knows that Mr. Darcy is my constant art companion. So we both went in this morning to the studio.

What I realized today (aside from what a southern accent I have, which hits me annually as I do this interview for my big show of the year) is that my brain really closes one book artistically and moves straight into something else. I came home from Paris and spent a good bit of time painting and making prints from the landscape watercolors that I did there, but in the two weeks since the show got on the walls, I've completely shifted over to this new series I'm doing, and that's what was in my brain to talk about. Fortunately the first one of the self portraits was in the show, so it was a legit topic of conversation. And talking about the trip and my art process gave me things to say that weren't "Hey, I did this specific piece that you can't see because it's radio!"

So here's the interview, about 15 minutes, for anyone who's curious.

My show is fully up, signs and everything, my reception is this Friday (Nov. 18th, 5-6:30 at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis), so I went dancing to celebrate. And to restore a little equilibrium after the week that was difficult for me and so many of my friends. It was marvelous to spend a weekend with sisters and other special people and to get my joy on dancing. Usually dance weekends are the only time I completely walk away from art and don't even sketch, but I did do just a couple at Noodle in Decatur, Georgia, while having lunch with our crew. The laughing Buddha above was too delightful to ignore, and I also loved the warm lamps dancing above the table tops. Plus it's nice to have those good memories woven into my art journal.