I was so honored to get to spend time at Anderson’s own cottage at the family community of Shearwater yesterday. I sat and dreamed and sketched and drank it in. I also wanted to do a small video tour for friends I know would be interested, so here that is. I’ll do a separate post with photos and sketches, to keep things from loading too slowly.

The throughline for artist spaces fascinated me. The huge wall of windows in the main room reminded me of Giverny, and the collections of stones, driftwood, and bones made me think of the photos I’ve seen of O’Keefe’s home with stones along the windowsills. Light and nature collecting seem to sing to artists, especially the ones whose art is so much a product of their places, who tend to be the artists I most admire.

I've been reading Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, and the idea of a log book really appealed to me. I'd been doing a gratitude list at night in my regular journal for a while and fizzled. I'm pretty bad with doing anything daily except dog walks. But I'd kind of missed that reflection and thought I'd try it. It's not a ton of writing about your day -- a few, quickly recorded highlights.

I'm teaching a Keeping a Sketchbook workshop at WAMA at the end of this month, as well as a Sketching Outdoors one. I keep food journals in sketchbook form, a regular sketchbook, and travel journals when I take trips. It felt like the right time to test drive a new thing and see how I like it -- and to have another option to show, even if I don't do this daily going forward, which honestly feels a little iffy even though I like it when I do it. I wrestle with "shoulds" and feel like there are enough on my list (house issues, commissions, etc.) without my gratuitously adding to them. I am enjoying getting reacquainted with markers, though. And it's fun to do something this informal. I like graphic storytelling, even though I don't see myself going into full-on comics.

A friend of mine uses the hashtag #dailyish to denote both intention and built in grace. I love that and feel that way about sketching, work, and all kinds of things. This type of journal may go in that category.

I took a bunch of intentional time off in April, but I've been having trouble reconnecting with my work. So Saturday I happily went along to Memphis Urban Sketchers at Crosstown Concourse, our remodeled old Sears tower. Nicely it was one of the places we meet that I can walk to, which is always a pleasure. Seeing friends was primary, and I had a lovely time sitting on the upstairs terrace and sketching the reflections in the door and chatting with my friend Christina. It felt good to draw with no agenda, and I ended up happy with what I had done.

Afterwards we moved out to the front plaza to watch the fanfare of Puppy Palooza. It was delightful to watch all the dogs go past and sketch the ones that caught my eye. Sketching dogs is sheer joy, and I stayed for lunch and an extended visit at Global Cafe afterwards.

I was on such a roll, and it was such a beautiful day, that I kept my sketching bag with me as I walked Gideon over to the park after I got home. We went around the lake but then found an open picnic table under my favorite tree. Gideon spotted a stick he liked, so I settled in to sketch and enjoy the afternoon. The good feeling and good sketching has extended into my week, I'm happy to say, and I made good progress on my current commission today. I'm grateful for such a wonderful group of artist friends to meet up with regularly. It's always good for my work to get out and sketch with other people.

I made a flying trip to Ocean Springs again recently and stopped to see Faulkner's home at Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS, on the way back. I hadn't been since I was a teenager and was struck by both the beauty and the lasting imprint of Faulkner's personality on the place. It was given to the adjacent University of Mississippi by his daughter, so all the original furnishings are in place, along with some well told stories in the individual rooms. I loved his study with the typewriter he used, the fan that blew papers off his desk, and the outline of a story written around the wall once the fan had blown his outline around one too many times. I tape things up on my wall to look at all the time in my work, so I felt a kinship to that approach.

But the thing that really grabbed me, as always, was the TREES. They called so loud that I went back down the next week to walk the forest path next to the house (leading, beautifully, to the university art museum) and to draw the trees I'd been thinking about. It was good to spend more unhurried time, check out the exhibitions at the museum, poke around in Square Books, and visit Faulkner's grave at the local cemetery. With my show up at WAMA, it's nice to have a new thread of art to start dreaming on, and we'll see what comes from these trees. My last few prints for WAMA had moved from water back to trees, so this feels like a lovely continuity to where my muse had been leading me already.

This last sketch is the last page in my sketchbook, and it has my Ohr museum sticker from down on the coast. I love to put those entry stickers from various museums right at the front or back of my sketchbooks. this tree just happened to need the one half page, so I went ahead and worked around the sticker that was already there.