I've been working to update my website lately, and I've added several book covers to my illustration page. A Troubling of Goldfish is new this summer, my second for Corey Mesler who also owns (with his wife Cheryl) Burke's Book Store which turns 150 this year (!) and has supported my own books since I started. I'm delighted his publishers wanted to use my work. The tree on the grey textured cover is from the Book of Common Worship for the Presbyterian Church, USA. That's my biggest illustration job to date, finished several years ago.

The newest cover is one I designed for my Dad's book, Poems of a Green and Pleasant Land. Dad wrote his way through most of British and Irish history back in the 70's to 90's, before self publishing was easily available. It's felt great to circle back to this project and be able to put it together for him and have a physical book in his hands. The hard copy proof came today, and I'll put the order in as soon as the Ingram website finishes its maintenance this week. Burke's is going to stock a few for the history nerds out there, and I'm so grateful to them for keeping all our family books.

Memphis Magazine let me illustrate their back page feature "The Last Stand" last month. I loved having an open ended invitation to tell a story. It was a quickish turnaround, and I didn't manage a full narration, but I went to two farmers markets after getting the assignment and had fun conversations as well as seeing the rich visual bounty of such places. I ended up doing a graphic feature called "Farmers Market chit-chat." I keep saying I'd like to do more visual storytelling, and it was lovely to get the invitation. See the whole spread here.

And of course Henry made an appearance.

I'm continuing to play with small prints and varied backgrounds. The very back layer of both of these is the same simple, uncarved shape, yellow in the top and orange below. Then I put a second sky layer on each before adding the black figure block. It's Glastonbury Abbey on top and Stonehenge below. I've missed ancient places lately (though a visit to The Cloisters helped a lot!), and doing these prints was a way to revisit them mentally.

I like to do one small sized, mostly for me project in the summer. It's a good time to play before the fall shows ramp up. These are small and achievable sizes, and people may or may not follow me into my ancient stones preoccupation. I might or might not do full editions of any of them, but at the least I'll have a selection of small, achievably priced prints once the fall shows do roll around.

I walked through the entrance hall and stepped out into the first cloister and fell immediately in love. I had only spent a handful of days in New York and had never before had the time to take the longer ride up to the north end of Manhatten. The Cloisters is a bit remote, which I am sure protects it from the worst of the crowds, but it is so worth the journey.

In my more restricted last few years I have been missing Europe badly. I love traveling places where the history is old. I love being surrounded by Medieval buildings and carvings. The Cloisters was such a balm for me. It's a crazy mish-mash, but it is so beautifully done that it utterly works. Barnard, a sculptor, lived and worked on the continent in the early 20th C and became a compulsive collector of Medieval carved stone. He bought a whole chapter house in France that had been reduced to usage as a barn. He bought three cloisters, none of them complete but with enough original pieces to put together evocative and beautiful spaces. Every door and doorway in the place is historical and different, but the stone structure that houses all of these disparate pieces is so simple and sensitive that it all feels almost inevitable. Rockefeller saw Barnard's collection and donated this museum that brought all those pieces into one living building. I miss the time when billionaires built museums and schools and libraries, but we continue to be richer as a society because of the ones who did.

Another thing that feels European is the way the indoor and outdoor spaces flow together. I am still masking in public, and it was such joy to have so much of the museum open air. There are some lovely galleries too, plus one stunning Robert Campin altarpiece that I had studied in college and was surprised to meet face to face. The windows, like the doorways, set panels of Medieval glass into simple, diamond shaped glass panes with glimpses of the Hudson through the gaps. The stained glass is alive and vital in a way that it never is that funeral home way of artificial lighting from behind. It doesn't all match, but it harmonizes. I truly fell in love with the whole place. My dad had been telling me for years that I needed to go, but I was never in the city for more than a day or two. I'm so glad I made it, and I will definitely be back.

The collection of artwork is gorgeous too. I fell in love with this small English saint and sketched him in my smaller purse sketchbook. I also had a lovely long conversation with a summer intern at the Met (what a dream job!) in the unicorn tapestries room. She's an artist as well, and it was so fun to hear about her big adventure of a summer and share our work a bit. I love traveling solo because it leaves space for me to meet and spend time with people instead of being more walled in a bubble of companions.

The first sketch was the cloister with the cafe. I loved being able to get a nice salad and real tea and sit at a table and draw the beautiful garden in the center. After lunch I came back up and drew the biggest cloister that was the first thing I saw. I love the twisted trees in this one. It's only a third the size of its original, but they made it the size that matched the capitals they had, and they filled in some of the columns and surrounding walls with stone from the same quarry. I was on a bench back underneath the overhang, and the colors got a little bright on me. I also think I was just so uplifted that I leaned into the pinks and purples. I toned it down a bit later in better light, but it's still a slightly over the top emotional response to the beauty of the place, and that's ok.

I spent all day there and just missed the bus as I walked out. There was a lot of traffic, so a group of us waited a bit for the next one, and I did a much quicker sketch of the outside, using ink and a red watercolor marker since I was fully outside the museum. To end the day I pulled out my smaller sketchbook again and sketched a couple of the fellow would-be passengers. It was a congenial group and a marvelous day.

My second full day in New York I headed for the Frick. Reading about their small Vermeer show had been the tipping point for buying my ticket and taking the plunge. Plus I've been reading all fall about their newly opened second story -- galleries in the family rooms that were offices, closed to the public, for decades. They've done a gorgeous job. I would love for them to have more benches, but otherwise it was wonderful. I did find a great bench at the top of the grand stairway where I could look down to the main hall and the organ and grandfather clock. I had so much fun drawing the birds eye view of the museum, using my Inktense pencils again. They are more candy colored than my normal palette, so I put a few grey washes down later to try to keep it from being quite so bright, but overall I was delighted with how it came out.

The three Vermeers gathered for the show all centered around letters. There was the Frick's own epistolary piece, one from the Rijksmuseum, and one I had never seen in person from Dublin. It was funny. There was a line down the block and sometimes around the corner to get in, but once you were inside the museum you could flow into the Vermeer room at will. It would sometimes get a little crowded, but most people looked at each piece about a minute and cleared out, and there were plenty of quiet times in between. I got to stand with each piece as long as I wanted to. Vermeers are a rare treat and worth savoring. Oddly the other two Vermeers were almost ignored in the main museum. And when I got back to the Met, they had five in a room that was also mostly empty. People are funny. But I'm glad I went to see the ones that live further away. It was such a good day, made better by a lovely chat with a bookmaker who now lives in Colorado. I had my lunch outside and was working on my sketch a little in the better light. I love that art is so often an introduction to people when I'm traveling alone. (Hi, Rosemary!)

Here's the sketch I did waiting for the museum to open that morning. The Met had opened at 10, so I had (foolishly) assumed the Frick was on the same schedule. Turns out it was 10:30, but I had a sketchbook to entertain me.

Walking back up to the bus at the end of the day I spotted this bright pink food truck and had to sketch it. I am so visually drawn to the fever dream colors and fun shapes of food trucks. Sometime I'll end up with a whole series of them I'm sure.

There is a huge Sargent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and I had been hoping all year to get up there and see it. I was just about to give up because of health and logistics, but I felt better several days in a row and decided to just go for it last minute. It was SUCH a good decision. And I was lucky to be flexible and able to go last minute. I spent Monday to Friday in New York, home on Saturday, and I just drank in art. I went ahead and joined the Met both to support a great museum and so I could go in and out at will. And hopefully I'll go back again and use it some more in the next year.

The Sargent show was great, a wide selection of work from the earlier part of his career, the part where he was based in Paris. He was ridiculously prolific, and there were many I'd never even seen reproductions of. There were a bunch in private collections but also old friends I've seen in other places in other years.

I found benches and sat and sketched a good bit, also just sat and looked deeply. The gallery sketches are all Derwent Inktense pencils. The NY museums have a pencil only policy, and I love the Inktense ones because they have more depth and saturation than most pencils. They're made with ink instead of watercolor, and when you put a little water on them (I usually use a water brush for a blender), they really pop. I tend to get in the habit of drawing with fountain pens at home, so it's fun to mix up texture and use the pencils sometime.

I enjoyed drawing people with the art a few times, including that first full length portrait of the doctor in the super saturated red. After lunch I went back in and drew the Daughters of Edward Droit, one of my favorite Sargent portraits anywhere (aside from Lady Agnew in the Scottish National Gallery). I had seen it in Boston a decade ago and been completely blown away by the composition as well as the beauty of the brushstrokes. I drew it straight up, just looking deeply and enjoying the painting.

Toward the end of the day I wandered through the American wing and saw a father and son in blue stripes and checks hanging out in front of an orange Helen Frankenthaler. It was a wonderful sight. It took me a couple of minutes to get out my book and pencils, so it's a super fast sketch as they moved on out, but I was happy with feel of it.

I got on a wild hare last week and started a whole series of small prints and interchangeable backgrounds. It all started with the small black and white print of Glastonbury Abbey that I did as an illustration for my dad's poetry book I've been putting together for him. I enjoyed doing a small, achievable project. It also was lovely to revisit a place from my past while I am stuck at home this spring and summer. I miss traveling, and it feels good to mentally revisit places I've loved in the past. I've long felt that I could extend a trip by making art from it on my return, keeping it present and lively in my mind, and I'm now tapping back into that energy by revisiting places from further ago. Glastonbury made me think of both the Tor nearby and also Stonehenge. I've been drawing out and carving simple backgrounds. I'm still working on a couple more, and I'm going to try some different colors with them (see the solid moon, versus the one with the grey spots, versus the one with orange added behind it, though I'll probably tone that color down a bit for the final version). I've only got single tests of the more recent backgrounds, but I printed a new batch of backgrounds today to start the process over again.

The first abbey I carved was intended as only a black and white piece, so it had a good bit of lacework carved out of the structure. I've carved a mirror image of it, more solid with see through windows, to test out as well. These are all just snapshots, not finished sketches since none of the prints are finished either, but I have enough to share the project taking shape. It's fun to see it beginning to make its way from a few color sketches into carved prints. Eventually I may add another place or two as well. The Acropolis means a lot to me after my summer in Athens, or perhaps the temple at Sounio.

I almost always start a small, experimental project in summertime. After doing all the very large Rowan Oak pieces last year, doing something small (and prints that don't have to line up exactly perfectly) feels light and easy. Just right for summer.