Those of you who remember me 50 pounds heavier in my 20's know I've always had a slightly shaky relationship with food. Mostly sugar. My parents used to hide the treats from me. I said for years that I had a loop track going in my head saying, "Can we have a cookie? Is it time for a cookie now? What about now???" Incessantly. I spend a ton of my time thinking about what I'm going to put in my mouth next -- which is probably one reason art is such a joy to me, because it's the thing I'm most likely to lose myself in for a while and not think about food.

In my late 20's my dad was newly single and going on a ski trip/legal conference but didn't want to go alone. All of us in my family knew that I was never going to be a candidate for downhill, with its speed and athleticism, but Dad talked me into trying cross country. I knew I was going to be terrible at that, but I didn't want to also be embarrassed by my total lack of wind and stamina, so Dad and I started walking daily to get ready for the trip. As it turned out, I never could stay upright long enough for wind or stamina to be an issue. I did, however, find myself a happy winter occupation of going out snowshoeing with a sketchbook in my pocket.

By the time the trip had rolled around, I was already losing weight (slowly) and feeling physically better, so I kept up the walking and didn't actually diet (I hate going hungry), but I made some substitutions in my eating habits that felt sustainable long term. I lost the 50 pounds over a year and a half or so and managed to keep them off, finding a balance between eating what I enjoy and moving enough to offset it.

Then menopause hit, followed by long covid, which has meant an interruption to the daily 3 mile walks I did for decades, and it's been more of a struggle. I work at home right next to the kitchen and I'm a stress eater, so periodically I fall into putting more things into my mouth than I'm physically hungry for. When that happens, I do a day or two at a time of a food journal. The rule is that before I eat something, I have to draw it, so it makes me more mindful. It's also positive and satisfying activity, rather than a punitive measure.

A lot of these pages are done with a pair of ink brush pens, one dark and one lighter in tone, but I also use these pages to play with different media than I normally use. I keep them pretty quick so meals don't get cold. Another upside is more mindfully enjoying my mixed pottery collection that I use for my daily meals. Above are a teapot from Sauk Mountain pottery in WA (and the memory of sharing it with a good friend), a bowl and teacup with a Julian of Norwich quote by Melissa Bridgman here at home.

I like the idea of markers, but usually I reach for watercolor instead when I'm out sketching, so a food journal page can be a good reset.

One time I was away from home (and away from my regular big sketchbook for this) and tried watercolor instead, but it was too much of an effort to keep up. The food journal can't be too big a mental barrier or I won't do it at all. But watercolor was fun for a day.

I have been kind of fascinated by the advent of GLP-1s and read a lot about them. I'm mostly holding steady where I want to be and don't like adding medicine I don't need, but it is HARD to lose weight the old way, and I'm so glad for my friends who have found the relief they need. It's also been such a comfort to me to read the experience of others and hear the term "food noise." I come from a family of people who legit forget to eat lunch (never have I ever), and I thought I was a freak outlier with my internal cookie loop track. It turns out there are a lot of people wired the way I am, and that has been such a joy to know. Which is probably one reason I'm stepping in here and writing a much more personal blog post than I usually do. Another reason is that I'm still working on the memoir and getting more used to the idea of sharing  personal details. When I do take that leap, I find the sharing  makes bridges and helps other people, the way that reading about food noise helped me.

I don't hold myself strictly to these food journal days. It's meant to be mindful rather than punitive. Sometimes unexpected things happen during the day, and I fizzle.

Sometimes I fizzle super fast.

The flip side of all these food journal pages is a quantity of pages in my regular sketchbook celebrating treats. Yesterday was one of those days. I walked inside Crosstown (bad air lately with the smoke pollution) and felt called by the nearby cinnamon rolls at Lucy J's bakery afterwards. I've always loved Wayne Thiebaud's paintings of cakes and pies and all the good things. So often when I'm having something delicious, I like to enjoy the look of it by sketching it before eating it. I did a whole show one year, buying eclairs, Napoleons, and macarons in Paris and painting them before eating them. It spreads out and slows down the enjoyment for me. So here is a celebration of yesterday's deliciousness. I'm grateful to have found a moderation I can live with that has room for delight still built in.

The Canadian smoke cleared (we've had terrible air for several days now), so Henry and I headed to the forest. My reward for getting out early was an up close and personal conversation with a barred owl. It had been a while since I'd seen one, between my fatigue and the bad air keeping me out of the forest. It always feels like a blessing, a visitation. She swooped in front of me to land quite close and unusually low on a nearby branch and sat there and let me sketch her until Henry got too close. Then she moved further off and higher, and I drew her again from the back.

It was a perfect start to the day. I followed up with second tea on the back porch reading the paper and then getting back into the graphic memoir, which I'd stalled out on for a few days. I'm at almost 50 pages, and I'm still so much enjoying that project. I've been doing much more of that than sketching from life lately, so it's nice to have something exciting to share here. I have some hope of getting the memoir published, so I haven't wanted to pt much

There's a 1900 Parisian cafe show at my local museum just now (Dixon). I love that time period and the whole slew of different styles they had going on, and Vuillard is one of my favorites. There is one stunning Vuillard on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and I'm so grateful to be getting to spend some time with it here. Once again I'm having to make do with the artificial colors of pencils and crayons since it's only dry media in the local museum, and it's a little too candy colored. I also sat on a bench across the room, so it's just an impression from there instead of trying to get all the details in, but I loved sitting and drinking it in for a while. A perfect sort of Saturday.

I had such a welcome day yesterday. Events have overtaken me lately, and I've barely been getting through the necessaries with no time for the soul giving extras. I kept yesterday morning to finally see the new Parisian Cafe paintings exhibition (clustered around 1900) at Dixon yesterday. Like all large group shows it was a mixed bag, but the good stuff was really good. There was a stunning Vuillard, who is one of my favorites, and a lot of great prints (always happy for me) including a lifesized Steinlen cabaret poster that was beautifully designed and executed. I love that 1900 era, with so many different styles and subjects burgeoning. Clearly in a specific subject matter you don't get as many of the symbolists I love from that period, but they did have a Munch I'd never seen before, and there were a lot of recognizable artists as well as a bunch of new ones to me.

Beautifully, the museum cafe has designed a special menu just for this show. I treated myself to a salad Nicoise outside with the trimmed trees that also feel like Paris and the Rodin sculpture in the background. It was good to see art and take time to sketch again, and I did a big, loose piece in my biggest sketchbook with a dip pen, some green ink, and a bunch of watercolor on top.

That evening was a bonus urban sketchers outing to Shapeshifter Art School. They have two new shows up in their galleries, and it was such pleasure to just relax and sketch and talk with friends. I ended up sketching our founder Elizabeth Alley, who is also a founder of the school. She has been such a light to the art community here in Memphis.

 I play old time music every Monday night in someone's back room, just for fun. Actually my whole month has been knocked off kilter, so it was my first time in a few weeks, and I also haven't been sketching the last 10 days or so. When Mike's banjo string burst late in the jam, I handed him my banjo. He is definitely first chair banjo and the backbone of the group. I told him I haven't been sketching, so I got out my tiny (3.5x5") purse sketchbook and did a series of people with instruments for the last half hour. These are all basic black ink in a Lamy fountain pen plus a little bit of Payne's grey Windsor and Newton watercolor marker. I'm pretty bad at likenesses, but I love drawing the juxtaposition of bodies and instruments. It was a great way to finish out evening and get my sketching jump started again.

I'm still on a walnut ink kick. I got a new Speedball dip pen nib. I have a B-2 in my sketching kit that I've been using out in the forest. I decided to try the slightly larger B-1 and have it on my coffee table for evening sketching. I think the B-2 is the sweet spot for me. I had trouble keeping enough ink on the bigger surface to make the lines I wanted to. But it's always fun to try new things. I'm still working mostly on the memoir, so it feels good to do some looser things once in a while and also to have some not-for-publication work that I can show. The memoir so far is a personal project, no publishers involved, so I'm showing an occasional piece of it, but I don't want to flood the whole book out publicly in case I can find a publisher lately. So this blog is a little quieter than sometimes, which gives me a good nudge to sketch as well as do more careful projects.

I finally got my walnut ink back in my main sketch bag, and I've been enjoying it lately. I've got a big, blunt dip pen, and these forest sketches are both in my biggest sketchbook. It's been fun getting big and messy to offset the more careful illustration work I've been doing for the new book.

My favorite cafe has a summer special of peach chai. It is delicious. I got it the first time and sketched with walnut ink and a fat yellow marker plus a little paint. Then I kept thinking about it and went back and sketched with the walnut ink again and a little more paint. It's funny. I had one big sketchbook one summer, and I found myself a little reluctant to start a sketch feeling that it was a lot of real estate to cover. I loved the ones I did, but I didn't always sketch as much as I might have. This summer the big one is the one I'm reaching for the most. I decided just to have a large one going alongside my normal size and not try to box myself into one or the other. I think the dip pen is a game changer. It forces me big and loose, and I'm just enjoying playing with the space.

There was a tree that caught my eye from my favorite patio, and I settled in to sketch it, with my fun little Prius in front. I like drawing my small car in an age of hulking SUVs. I've been on a dip pen kick lately, and I used some walnut ink. I had thought to add paint afterwards, but I ended up liking the line and deciding not to overdo it. I didn't get nearly the full tree on the page, however -- I usually go bigger than I mean to. So I did a second version.

This time I started with the tree and got *almost* all of it in. I started with paint too and added very little line afterwards (in my current favorite Diamine Chopin ink). I like this one for different reasons, but as so often happens, neither one is even close to the vision I had in my head before I started. In my better moods I think of the paint or ink as a partner in the process that takes me in a different direction. In my worse, I wonder why on earth I can't manage to draw a tree the way I want to. Mostly I was pleased with the outcomes, so we'll go with that today.

Elizabeth Alley was sitting with her show on its final Saturday at Shapeshifter Art School and invited folks to drop by. I had wanted to sketch it a bit more, so I took my dip pen and biggest sketchbook and did a couple of loose, fun sketches. Drawing other people's work helps me really pay attention to it and remember it later. I love this show so much. I love how the arctic has just captured Elizabeth -- Levisham moor did that to me years ago. It's magic when a landscape takes you by the scruff of the neck and demands your attention. My favorite piece is her life sized silhouette of herself with the arctic in rectangle right at her heart. I love how she's busted out of her longtime traditional painter mindset (still something very real for me) and made these playful, large, casual installations, layering paper pieces , assembling a wall of glacier paintings, and crocheting "plushy glaciers" that hang from the ceiling. Her enormous ship (see a previous blog post) is also in line with this playfulness. It all works. When I try to switch to 3-d or installations, it looks like a 4th grade project, but I guess I should keep trying. Anyway, I wanted to just drink it in and hang out with some great art, and I ended up hanging out equally with some great friends. Cool people kept showing up and dropping in, and it was a delightful day. I'm grateful for this brand new art space in town.